Your Best People Want to Innovate. Are You Getting in Their Way?

83% of companies rank innovation as a top-three priority. Only 3% say they’re ready to deliver on it¹.

I hear versions of this story constantly: a company has a great run, growth is strong, the market rewards them, it’s all happening. Then…not so much. Leadership starts agitating for what’s next, maybe launches an initiative or two, and many of them stall before they had a chance. So, more meetings get scheduled and more decks get built. Then…it’s six months later, not much has really shipped, and everyone starts talking about efficiency and delivery for the next quarter.

I’m a fractional CEO and COO and executive coach with TechCXO, and an award-winning intrapreneur and author. I wrote a book about this exact phenomenon, The Inside Innovator: A Practical Guide to Intrapreneurship. It grew out of years of watching this same story play out, in my own career and in the executives I coach, and it’s become the foundation for how I think about this work. It is my experience, and my passion. These days I balance among advisory services, workshops on the topic, and speaking including at events like EntreCon Midwest, but more on that later.

Here’s what I’ve noticed after years of coaching executives through exactly this: the best people who can actually solve for this are often already on the team.

They just need permission to be unleashed.

An Intrapreneur Is Not the Same Thing as an Entrepreneur

The word for what those people do (or more accurately, are capable of doing) is intrapreneurship. You may have heard the word, and the concept, if not the practice of it, is very simple: creating real value, through innovation and growth, from inside a larger organization instead of starting a new one.

It may sound like entrepreneurship “lite,” but it most definitely is not. 

Intrapreneurs operate inside organizational constraints that entrepreneurs don’t have to navigate: org charts, budget cycles, other people’s priorities, decisions made at the levels above them. What they do have is access to things an entrepreneur starting from zero likely doesn’t have: a team, a customer base, capital, credibility, a brand that’s already known and trusted. 

Here’s a caveat: coach someone to act like a founder or entrepreneur when they’re actually building inside a company, and you set them up to fail. It’s a whole different game, with different rules that tap a different skillset.

Intrapreneurship isn’t industry-specific. I’ve helped it succeed in media, technology, professional services, transportation, and organizations of every size. It’s not a “tech thing.” Intrapreneurship is universally applicable. Wherever there’s a company with more than one layer of decision-making, there often exists a disconnect between what it wants to build and what it’s currently able to deliver.

That gap is where the 83% / 3% reality lives.

Everyone Wants Innovation. Few Are Ready For It.

Almost every leadership team plays up innovation as something that deeply matters. It often ranks at or near the top of priorities they care about in leadership polls. But between wanting it and delivering it is generally where innovation languishes. Still, truly wanting innovation and creativity is critical to making it happen.

Closing the want/have gap has real outcomes. Companies that solve it grow in ways their competitors can’t match, because the growth comes from inside talent that already understands the customer, the product, and the market. Companies that stall on it end up watching that same talent solve the problem for someone else instead. There’s nothing like the freedom to be innovative as a recruitment tool.

So what’s holding companies back? In my experience, it all comes down to a set of repeat offenders including:

• Broken processes that make new ideas hard to move through the organization.
• Underinvestment, because funding tends to follow what’s already working, not what’s unproven.
• And the most common one I see: hiring good people, then not giving them permission to act.

That last point can be particularly damaging. When people are hired for their judgment and then boxed in by unnecessary guardrails and rules, they’re not going to want to stay boxed in forever. You end up with good people with enormous innovative potential who are frustrated, disengaged, and ready to leave and build the thing they wanted to build for you somewhere else. At a competitor, or on their own. I’ve sat across the table from executives who couldn’t understand why their most capable people kept leaving, without ever asking what those people were allowed to actually do while they were there.

Empowerment is at the heart of intrapreneurship. It’s the difference between having a team of wildly creative intrapreneurs innovating for you, and having employees who want to be intrapreneurs but are stifled by lack of management enthusiasm, process red tape, or simple corporate ennui.

What Makes an Intrapreneur Tick

Not everyone is a natural intrapreneur, and that’s fine. But the people who are tend to share a handful of traits: curiosity, a bias toward action, the ability to build bridges across a large organization, a real tolerance for risk, and a kind of enduring, grounded optimism.

These are not the kinds of things you always find on a resume. It’s more observed, like how someone handles the stretch between a “good idea” and a result that actually works (the enduring optimism is key here, as that stretch is never as short or smooth as anyone hopes). Curiosity gets someone to notice the opportunity in the first place; bridge-building gets the idea past all the people who could otherwise kill it or disregard it without consideration; and risk tolerance (and more optimism) gets someone through the unknown where the idea hasn’t paid off yet, and there’s no proof it ever will.

Early in my career, our team started building mobile apps on Java, BREW, Windows Mobile, Symbian. Progress was slow, and it took real patience to keep investing in something that hadn’t proven itself yet. We got better and better over time. Then Apple launched the App Store, we built for it, and that app became one of the most downloaded in the world. Growth wasn’t linear; it rarely is. The people who stuck with it through the slow part were the ones who were still around to experience a real breakthrough and contribute in new ways.

A resume can’t capture that part. It’s also what separates someone who talks up innovation from someone who actually does it.

Tapping Your Inner Intrapreneur

I’ll be talking through all of this in more depth on September 16 in Beloit, Wisconsin, at Entrecon Midwest, a national-caliber conference built to run at a local level. My session is called “Foundations of Intrapreneurship,” and it’s where I usually start with a group before we go deeper into workshops or advisory work.

Quint Studer, who has helped build Entrecon into what it is, puts it better than I can: “Organizations should love intrapreneurs because they’re the people that are pushing you to be better.“

If any part of this sounds like your company, or like someone on your team, that’s worth sitting with before the next initiative stalls out. This is only the beginning of the conversation. There’s a lot more to say about what closing this gap actually looks like in practice, and I’ll be picking that up in future posts.

Until then, just know that some of the people who can close your innovation gap are likely already on your payroll. The only question is: are you ready to unleash those intrapreneurs?

1. Boston Consulting Group (BCG), June 4, 2024.