Light A Fire In Your Team With Intrapreneurship

Sometimes, if you’re lucky, you’re on a team at work that just clicks. You and your colleagues are full of passion, ideas, drive, and goodwill. You’re producing work that you’re proud of and making a real impact for the company. It feels like you’re lit from within by a powerful energy source.

I think back to my experience at Casper as the earliest time I had this feeling. We were a small, empowered team, whose expertise, while different, led us to go far beyond the confines of a 'marketing' or 'operations' or 'X' idea — and collectively innovate to strengthen both the brand and business. We were unwittingly classic intrapreneurs: an internal skunk works team given the leeway to innovate — a refreshing level of autonomy that unlocked transformative outcomes for the business. This gave way to Casper’s award-winning Insomnobot, the world's first bot that's only available to chat between 11 p.m. and 5 a.m.

Perhaps the best way to appreciate how valuable and effective skunk works teamwork can be is to be reminded of the history of the word itself. Skunk works was actually the pseudonym given to Lockheed Martin’s LMT advanced jet development team in the 1940s. The stakes couldn’t have been higher. At the height of World War II, American pilots needed better planes.

Lockheed granted the engineers working in this group a high degree of autonomy. The group went on to develop and build the P-38 Lightning and P-80 Shooting Star. Eventually, Skunk Works would go on to create such game changers as the high-altitude reconnaissance planes the U-2 and the Blackbird, as well as many others.

This is the most dramatic example of intrapreneurship, but there have been many other famous ones since. With a brief look at some of the things invented by intrapreneurs, we can understand how valuable this ethos is. In 1975, Steven Sasson rendered photography so much more accessible when he invented the portable digital camera at Kodak.

In 1976, Steve Jobs revolutionized the world of personal computing when he and 20 Apple AAPL engineers split off from Apple to create the Apple Macintosh computer. To-do lists were never the same after 1977, when Art Fry created Post-It notes while working at 3M. And more recently, Google’s famous 20% rule spawned a little thing called Gmail, and also Google GOOG Maps.

Another version of this is called “corporate hacker,” a term coined by best-selling author Simone Bhan Ahuja – an industrious intrapreneur working at the edges of organizations to solve persistent problems that customers care about. Simone notes that ‘corporate hackers' often represent largely untapped but needed resources within established businesses.

The benefits of intrapreneurship don’t just reside in the potential for creating blockbuster inventions. Intrapreneurship sets an orientation within a company to avoid the innovator’s dilemma. Because companies are inertial — they’ll just do what they do if it’s working. But then, out of nowhere, innovations that come from outside of it can upend their whole existence. Here are some benefits of intrapreneurship:

• A company with teams full of intrapreneurs can spot opportunities just as readily as outsiders, and act on them quickly.
• Encouraging intrapreneurship also improves employee job satisfaction, retention, and morale.
• Allowing employees more agency and ownership over their own work is a surefire way to encourage true partnership.

But can intrapreneurship really be fostered in a company, or does it rely on a few exceptional employees to take initiative? I would argue emphatically the former. There are key ways any company can imbue their teams with intrapreneurship.

1. First and foremost, it starts at the top. Management must understand and encourage creativity, risk-taking, and ownership within their employees. As W. L. Gore & Associates president Bill Gore put it, "I don't know how one can take an authoritarian style of management and make it intrapreneurial." He would know. That general leadership principle led to the world’s first waterproof, breathable material: GORE-TEX.
2. Companies can encourage intrapreneurship further by having explicit policies supporting it. Set time aside in people’s schedules, a la Google. Hold events like hackathons and idea fairs, both great ways for teams to explore their creativity and ability to work together. Set clear guardrails and guidelines of what success looks like, and how projects must relate to core business. Incentivize creator ownership — let intrapreneurs take part in the profits of what they create.
3. Above all, start to get comfortable with giving up control, and trusting your team. People need to feel empowered and that they have the autonomy to create. This means that as a leader you have to step outside of your comfort zone.

It’s my firm belief that intrapreneurship is for everyone, and every workplace. The magic that it can unleash will transform your company if you make space for it.