Factors that Drive Intrapreneurship

As a business professional, you have a knack for leadership skills that other people notice. You take advantage of your soft skills to drive a culture of entrepreneurship, even if you're not a business owner yourself. Take advantage of intrapreneurial opportunities as you help your company achieve innovation and higher sales while advancing your own business acumen.

What Is Intrapreneurship?

Micah Solomon, writing for Forbes, defines intrapreneurship as developing connections with colleagues and employees within your company to develop the best innovations. Intrapreneurial opportunities occur at any time, any place and from anyone. Although revenue and profits are the ultimate gain, nurturing the culture of entrepreneurship within your company has several benefits that go beyond hard numbers, key performance indicators or your company's bottom line.

Employee Engagement

Intrapreneurial opportunities occur when you inspire an entrepreneurial spirit in the people around you. Engage in conversation with your co-workers daily to hear their ideas. Ask questions about how someone feels about a project, industry trends, the latest sales numbers or some technological tool that just hit the market. Remain proactive and have a meaningful discussion about the co-worker's theories. Do further research if you and your supervisors find that the ideas have merit. Not only do new concepts foster innovation, but the employee who started the conversation should earn praise and rewards for coming up with the solution to a problem.

Employee Retention

Intrapreneurial opportunities lead to better employee retention from engaged employees. These workers enjoy their jobs and want to stay with the company that appreciates their hard work, dedication and innovation. It's relatively easy to measure employee retention as it relates to better sales revenue, but there are intangible ways to foster intrapreneurship in your firm.

Concepts Beyond Hard Numbers

You have several reasons to seek out intrapreneurial opportunities within teams of people. These ideas keep boredom away from mundane, everyday tasks. Employees want to know they are doing meaningful work that has benefits to the company and to society as a whole. Employees love getting recognition attached to a project within the company, and they enjoy building and using tools to accomplish the end game. Perhaps the most important aspect of intrapreneurship is the collaboration that occurs within the best people who all believe in each other's ideas and goals.

Intraprenership is much like a sports team. Individual talents work together to score points, and when the team scores there are high-fives, excited shouts and smiles all around the office. Winning a game doesn't happen without the trust of people on a team who believe in the individual talents of players who fulfill their roles. In the end, identifying that the team did a good job means highlighting the accomplishments of everyone who participated in the effort.

Intrapreneurial opportunities are vital to moving a company forward. All it takes to start moving in the right direction is having an openness to conversations with everyone around you. Once you start asking questions, listening and implementing, you may find that your firm truly is an ideal place to work.

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