Businesses today face a tough competitive environment. The development of technology requires new ideas from enterprises – otherwise others will take their place. One of the simplest and most effective approaches to accelerating innovation is to use existing resources within the company – its employees, write analysts at Deloitte in the study “Five insights about internal entrepreneurship.”
RB.RU spoke with representatives of the largest Russian companies about the development of internal entrepreneurship and learned why business encourages its employees’ projects, what it gets from this and what lessons it learns.
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Internal entrepreneurship or intrapreneurship is the support from companies of their enterprising employees who want to develop their business. An employee becomes a businessman, but his project develops with the help of resources, mentors, money of the company in which he works.
According to Deloitte, intrapreneurship pays off many times over – in the growth of the company and the support of its corporate culture. Internal entrepreneurship contributes to the development of a proactive workforce and at the same time leads the company to a market leadership. Corporations with an entrepreneurial workforce are reaping the benefits, from motivating and developing a team to cost savings, innovative offerings and accelerated product and service launches, experts say.
Gmail, Google Adsense, Mac, iPhone – all these are examples of internal entrepreneurship projects that have been implemented by the largest companies in the world. Various forms of business support for employees were also organized by Russian enterprises: Yandex, Mail.ru Group, Kaspersky Lab, NLMK Group, Severstal and so on.
For example, since 2014, the procedure of experiments has been actively working at Yandex, says his representative. Each employee can not only develop a new technology, but also launch a project within Yandex and lead it. Every six months, Yandex reviews such projects – an experiment may turn into a separate business line or become a subdivision of an existing service. “We now have dozens of different experiments, and new ones are reviewed almost every week. Successful examples: Drive, Yandex’s car-sharing service, Zen, which today has grown into a business unit, and even Taxi – all once started as a small experiment, ”a Yandex representative lists.
However, in Russia, at most 50 companies from the top 1000 largest are actively looking for and launching new businesses , Dmitry Kalayev, director of Accelerator IIDF , said in an interview with Sekret Firmy in October 2019. “This is very little. But in comparison with 2019, this figure has practically doubled, ”he added.