A new beautfully designed blog by Seed Capital Partners, The Weekly Read, has an interview with | George Kassabgi, BEA VP (from May 2003). Among other things, George talks about Intraneurship (entrepreneurship within an existing organisation):
1. The intrapreneur lives by his or her optimism. The innovator is like the explorer. Ernest Shackleton in his diary listed the 5 top qualities of explorers and the number one quality was optimism, above endurance, above courage, above patience. Optimism.
2. It is a myth that the intrapreneur and the team ought to think and act like a start up. To be successful, you must leverage all the significant assets of the larger company and a start up does not think that way. You must align the initiative with the personality of the established company and a start up never has that limitation. You must be humble and build collaborative bridges with the other resources within a large company, reusing as many existing “channels” as possible.
3. Give yourself time to do something big. It has to be relatively big or it is not worth doing. Nobody is going to pay attention to a $10 million dollar business within a $4 billion company. Engage with customers and create a road map that ends up being something big and ends up spanning the time necessary to accomplish that. I think the intrapreneur is trying to do something much larger than the entrepreneur and has a longer time horizon. The entrepreneur can do something smaller scale and still be labeled a success and the time horizon can be quite short. And I dont think that was necessarily only the case in the so called boom years. The entrepreneur can do anything and can change that thing ten times. In fact the entrepreneurs success depends on it.
As Indian companies grow and globalise, they would do well to encourage intrapreneurship.
