dynamic

TRENDS
Embracing intrapreneurship
Building a culture of innovation and entrepreneurship
@phippsgregory
GREGORY PHIPPS, MANAGING
DIRECTOR, VENTURE CAPITAL,
INNOVACORP
“How can an established company
react to market realities, remain competitive
and fundamentally change the way
it operates — internally and externally?”
The answer is simple: Act like a start-up.
This is not a revolutionary or original
thought. The reality is that companies
from all verticals and of any size can
adopt and sustain a start-up culture.
In fact, they must do so, to remain competitive
and to stave off obsolescence and
potential death of their brands.
WHAT IS START-UP CULTURE?
When we think of “start-up culture,”
we might picture millennials in cargo
shorts and sandals, padding around an
open-concept office space with bean bag
chairs, scratching out plans on a whiteboard
in between games of foosball.
A true start-up culture, however,
involves much more than cool office
space and free snacks. Companies of any
size can embrace and sustain a culture of
innovation by embracing and emulating
many of the practices of start-ups and the
cultural values common among the most
successful ones, including:
Innovation. Entrepreneurial startups
always embrace the latest innovations.
They leverage technologies that are
cost-effective and enable more efficient
planning, CRM, product development,
and marketing automation. Start-ups
also use cloud-centric tools that allow
employees to contribute and collaborate
anywhere, anytime.
Passion. Passion is a hard quality to
define, let alone find, among candidates
for employment or internal promotion.
A start-up culture hires, develops, retains,
celebrates, incents, rewards, encourages
and promotes people who have passion
for the business and its success.
Workspace. Start-ups create
efficient and effective spaces for personal
and collaborative output. They value
cool work spaces because they want
employees to look forward to coming
to work and remaining fully engaged
while there. They provide the conditions
for employees to create and work in
comfortable environments, with freedom
to personalize their workspaces.
Eschewing corporate rules and rigid
work structures. Rigid corporate policies
and old-school structure is the bête noire
to a start-up. Start-ups hold a philosophy
of collaborating externally and across
the org structure, finding ways to work
smarter, and tossing outmoded, cumbersome
corporate rules out the window —
all to ensure efficient and effective, timely
delivery of solutions to customers.
The ability to act quickly and decisively.
In start-up culture, there’s always
a collaborative approach to solving
problems, and employees are empowered
to swiftly make decisions that can affect
company performance and success, decisions
they can “own” and be held responsible
for. When people are empowered to
make decisions and know their contributions
are valued, they will step up and
make a difference.
Keeping the aforementioned top-ofmind,
established companies can create a
culture of innovation within by adopting
some of the following practices:
Create a role or department to drive
innovation and entrepreneurial behavior.
Some people believe that a mandate for
everyone in a company to think and act
like an entrepreneur must start at the top.
Although there absolutely has to be a
senior-level embrace of the concept, the
action plan can be defined and initiated
at a much lower level in the org structure
and driven both up and down from
there. Establish a new role, with a direct
reporting line to the CEO, and define it
as Chief Innovation Officer.
Encourage intrapreneurship. Create
an internal “ideas” incubator to get new
products or services off the ground in
a non-traditional and non-linear way.
Create an opportunity for employees to
share their ideas for innovative solutions,
and you can rightfully declare your
company as being entrepreneurial.
Launch an internal “pitch” competition
to uncover ideas that are of strategic
benefit to the company, and like venture
capitalists — fund the best of them. If
this approach becomes a catalyst to more
efficient service delivery and/or incents
the development of new products or
services, it’s a win-win for the company.
Recruit and reward an entrepreneurial
mindset. Injecting any established
company with former entrepreneurs,
venture capital professionals and others
with actual start-up experience, is
the best way to kick-start a sustainable
culture that emulates an entrepreneurial
start-up.
Think and act like an owner. If you
want to motivate employees to think and
act like an owner, and all the positive
performance outcomes inherent to that
approach, you’ve got to make them owners.
Almost every start-up embraces the
concept of distribution of shares or share
options to employees as an effective
instrument for attraction, retention and
motivation. Corporations of any size can
adopt a similar approach with relative
ease at any stage in their evolution.
Embrace and adoption of those
practices embodied within the start-up
community need not be daunting or
represent a fundamental change to your
business or management practices. Their
implementation will pay rich dividends
in maintaining competiveness, engaging
and retaining high-performing employees,
and provide for a solid foundation
for sustaining growth.
Greg Phipps is Managing Director,
Venture Capital at Innovacorp. Greg
has managed more than 70 investment
transactions, in more than twenty
companies, in the IT, telecommunications
and healthcare vertical sectors.
Contact him @phippsgregory and
linked.com/in/gregoryphipps
30
JULY & AUGUST 2016