How intrapreneurship inspires growth by investing in human capital

Intrapreneurship taps into an employee’s full skill set

An investment into human capital actively looks to leverage success from an employee’s knowledge, skills, know-how, good health, and education. Unfortunately, traditional approaches to innovation often suffocate creativity, not least when employees need to seek permission from multiple managers before being able to work on their ideas. The biggest asset for innovation is your employees, and intrapreneurship facilitates autonomy – allowing employees to work on their ideas in their time. Crucially, they can use all of their experience and expertise to drive their innovations.

Having invested heavily in finding the best employees during the recruitment drive, stifling them by failing to integrate intrapreneurship could be the biggest mistake a company makes.

Intrapreneurship encourages employee engagement 

Scientific evidence and anecdotal support both confirm the correlation between burnout and decreased innovation. Furthermore, there has been an increasing trend of burnout in the workplace from employees across all demographics. When intrapreneurs are supported with innovation programs like KICKBOX, they are likely to be more engaged with their ideas. This is because they are encouraged to work on their innovations while these  are fresh in their mind and enabled to progress their ideas without constantly seeking approval from senior teams. This free mindset will naturally unlock heightened creativity.

Engaged employees are more productive in all work settings. Furthermore, it allows companies to reward and praise all contributors to make them feel valued. 

Intrapreneurship helps employees experiment and learn

Bottom-up innovation has supported countless companies like SwisscomThrough intrapreneurship, employees can gather valuable data by testing their ideas  on a small scale. It encourages them to always think about the consumer perspective and the viability of an innovation. Through a combination of creative thinking and data-driven decisions,  employees learn to accept failure and lean on the collective knowledge of colleagues and external knowledge bases.

It takes the power of human capital investments to greater heights, which subsequently inspires faster growth along with timely updates to keep innovations relevant. 

Intrapreneurship programs provide a framework for success

Research shows that 59% of company executives aren’t sure they have the right people with the right skills needed to deliver high-quality innovation. In many cases, though, employee innovations are heavily restricted because they do not have guidance. Intrapreneurship programs like KICKBOX help guide projects to their logical conclusion. This can help ideas become integrations or identify failed ideas at the earliest stage, which subsequently aids iterative approaches or innovation abandonment. Either way, it inspires growth through increased efficiency of time and money.

Crucially, the frameworks and templates streamline the process during the validation process and beyond, thus allowing to stay focused on innovation.