School for Intrapreneurs: Lessons from a FORTUNE Global 500 company
Copyright by Stephan Klaschka 2010-2025
Few mature organizations have comprehensive and effective internal innovation ecosystems. Constantly looking for outside ideas and buying fresh talent, they can easily overlook the vast potential and experience they already have. Once hired, your new great employee slips into invisibility over the years. The corporate mindset often perceives them as the person they were when they were hired years ago - and fails to invest in and leverage their human capital. - Does this sound familiar?
Do you find yourself in a place that struggles with the symptoms of Why mature organizations can’t innovate and Overcoming the Three Big Hurdles to Innovation in Large Organizations?
It is not easy and takes time to turn an organization’s mindset from what is into what if. It is, however, a great and rewarding achievement if you can pull it off! So, here is how it can work: I built a very successful “School for Intrapreneurs” at a large company as part of a larger innovation ecosystem, so I know that it can work, and am happy to share this approach with you!
Building an Ecosystem
If you are an innovator at heart and find yourself in a company that does not provide an environment supportive of intrapreneuring, you may want to consider building an innovation ecosystem within. This means that, practically, you choose to become a midwife the helping ideas of your colleagues to get a chance to come to life. This enables other aspiring intrapreneurs to step up, unite with you, and act together.
It’s a bold step and disruptive approach but necessary to induce the ability to “10X” change in meaningful and fundamental ways again to an organization as part of an ambitious Innovation Strategy: Do you innovate or renovate? - see also 10X vs 10% – Are you still ready for breakthrough innovation?
Following the words of Steve Jobs, “Creativity means connecting things,” here are some key ingredients to succeed based on my personal experience.
A sustainable environment consists, at least, of
A safe haven for employees to experiment
A perpetual pipeline of ideas from all areas of the organization,
A process to develop them without triggering the “organizational immune system” early on and
A transition mechanism to feed these ideas back into the regular organization to become funded and implemented with strategic alignment to company goals
Preparing management how deal with intrapreneurs. You will need to build or teach
A set of relevant intrapreneurial skills for employees
A supportive team and for you to maintain
A positive attitude that you will need to persist and push on.
The “School for Intrapreneurs”
A powerful approach and critical puzzle piece in a larger ecosystem I built was the School for Intrapreneurs. We built this school successfully with help from like-minded and supportive colleagues on all organizational levels whom I was fortunate to meet along my intrapreneurial path.
An underlying premise of the School for Intrapreneurs is that innovation skills can be taught. So, we taught them in this program. In the end, results count; or in the words I adopted from an Accenture advertisement: “It is not how many ideas you have. It’s how many you make happen.”
The Focus of the School for Intrapreneurs
Building intrapreneurial skills systematically, however, is only part of the deal. The true value of the program for the participants is in experiencing for themselves the obstacles an intrapreneur faces in an organization: the rocky road of rejection trying to get an idea on its feet.
As another novelty, any employee could join! While in large organizations, usually, managers select their favorites (‘high potentials’) to participate in innovation or development program participation, we effectively level the playing field. Advancement in the program is solely merit-based and driven only by a participant’s innovative idea and how well they can develop it and move it forward.
The participants, our fellow employees, were taken through a structured process where they formed supportive teams to collaborate to develop ideas together and to experiment to test and improve them. This also includes ways to communicate with management in constructive and non-threatening ways on How Intrapreneurs avoid “No!”, for example. Teams advance with their ideas only on merit.
This development program culminates in pitching ideas to experts and potential executive sponsors for funding, implementation, and support.
Besides support for ideas and teams, executive sponsorship ensures the strategic alignment of ideas with company interests and needs. It also increases the chances dramatically for an idea to transition into the established processes of the regular organization with minimum friction, i.e. the idea becomes a project to be implemented in the existing organization. This is why special emphasis needs to be put on preparing management on how to support and benefit from intrapreneurs; after all, there are risks involved with intrapreneuring for the individual pitching the idea as well as for the executive supporting it; see also The Rise of the Intrapreneur and How intrapreneurs find executive sponsors.
This School for Intrapreneurs program design addresses How to grow innovation elephants in large organizations and deliver big results along the lines of 10X vs 10% – Are you still ready for breakthrough innovation? - During my time with the School for Intrapreneurs program, it generated a 10X return on investment (ROI), so we were right on our 10X target.
Structure of the School for Intrapreneurs
The curriculum of the School for Intrapreneurs is structured in three courses, where the three courses build upon each other. We named them DOORWAY, PATHWAY, and JOURNEY:
DOORWAY is a two-hour awareness course that outlines how innovation happens in large organizations, typical obstacles, and the characteristics of an intrapreneur. For participants choosing to continue, it also hints at what is offered in the succeeding courses, PATHWAY and JOURNEY.
PATHWAY, at its core, is an incubator and accelerator. Over 12 weeks of training mixes with group work, experimentation, and idea development. At the end of the course, the teams pitch their developed ideas to a panel of experts and managers representing different business functions for in-depth feedback and advice on how to improve the ideas. – Think “Shark Tank” but without bloody teeth.
Teams with the most promising ideas then pitch to high-level executives in a second pitch round to pick up sponsorship and support. If successful, the ideas that find support become implementation projects entering the regular organization. Receiving the highest executive sponsorship is another level of validation that confirms strategy alignment with company interests and opens up funding and the path to implementation with executive support.
JOURNEY is a six-month course designed to accompany the implementation team by providing a mix of skill-building and team-customized coaching. – Why is this needed and important?
Even with executive sponsorship the project has neither been budgeted for nor are other resources planned and available for its implementation. Therefore, the project still disrupts the establishment and may trigger resistance by the affected middle management and the overall ‘organizational immune system’ (more details on the latter in a future post).
Shaping company culture
By itself, the School for Intrapreneurs is just a first step that immediately affects the intrapreneurs going through the process and graduating. As an innovation leader, I fully embraced and pushed this program forward, I had more in mind: Changing the (mental) DNA of our employees long-term and establishing innovation as a process within the organization.
This requires continuity, persistence, and building a growing change force with School for Intrapreneurs alumni all across the global enterprise. As cohort after cohort goes through the School for Intrapreneurs, this new network connects across business functions and locations while including various levels of the organizational hierarchy. Together, the School for Intrapreneurs is a powerful program for addressing and Overcoming the Three Big Hurdles to Innovation in Large Organizations.
Building a growing change force
Thus, we ask JOURNEY participants to connect with the next cohort completing the PATHWAY course to network, share their experiences, and help guide the “next generation” of graduates. The goal is to sustain the program by increasing the number of like-minded, experienced, and connected employees across the enterprise.
With an increasing number of graduates, over time, you keep the perpetual pipeline of fresh ideas open and flowing. The graduates also grow to become a powerful, far-reaching, and evolving network of active change-makers across all parts of the organization. They connect and pass on their knowledge to the next class going through the School for Intrapreneurs, and even beyond the School for Intrapreneurs.
The School for Intrapreneurs network alumni comprise self-identified, trained, and well-prepared leaders of change who now share common innovation terminology, skill set, and experience. They know whom to reach out to get support or move things forward in future projects and other work matters. Their work and legacy help shape the organizational culture and mindset broadly, making the School for Intrapreneurs not only a sustainable environment but also an effective innovation ecosystem in itself.
As for lasting success and sustainability, since the inception of the School for Intrapreneurs, Boehringer Ingelheim elevated Intrapreneurship globally to one of its three corporate values. The IT function established a BI X Digital Lab: Scouting for digital innovation as a more targeted engine!
Lessons from the School for Intrapreneurs
Here are my key learnings from the School for Intrapreneurs in a nutshell:
The individual journey with an ‘intrapreneurial experience’ is of utmost importance for the School’s participants and success. A theoretical, classroom training alone does not do the trick. It has to be hands-on and all the way from inception to implementation.
Anyone can join - it’s a level playing field.
This is why the participants value the safe space to operate and experiment.
Typically, talent in large organizations is selected top-down by management. In contrast, the talent self-identifies bottom-up and progresses in the School for Intrapreneurs on intrapreneurial merits alone.
The alumni are hardened by their experience and become part of a growing community of capable and engaged change agents who bring the company forward beyond their calling - everyone wins.
Successful pitches to executives validate the alignment with company strategy – not only for the individual idea but also broader for the entire program of the School for Intrapreneurs.
The School for Intrapreneurs program gives more disruptive, risky, and outside-the-box ideas a chance that otherwise would not have been brought to executive attention, or so our executive sponsors said in appreciation.
The School for Intrapreneurs is part of a larger framework to change company culture over time by cultivating discovery and enabling 10x innovation capabilities once again.
Stay tuned for my next post: Innovation Killers: The Corporate Immune System Strikes Back!