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Intrapreneurship is evidently currently a hot topic, This week I received notifications of two different Intrapreneurship Conferences in New York City in October 2015. One October 21 – 23rd, simply called the Intrapreneurship Conference states it is the 6th edition and another one called the Corporate Innovation Summit on October 8th states it is a spin-off event. I have no personal knowledge of either event so can not report on them, but I do have roughly 20 years of personal experience as an Intrapreneur at Bose and Apple in the corporate world, in higher education at Cogswell Polytechnical College and at DARPA probably one of the speediest, most progressive and best funded technology think tanks in the US Government.

Bottom Line – Intrapreneurship Works especially well in innovation cultures and seems to follow some common progressions of steps to be described below but first lets define the term.

An intrapreneur is an internal Entrepreneur, meaning they have significantly less responsibility to make things happen than most entrepreneurs who have to generate the resources to meet a payroll. As entrepreneurs take greater risks they also enjoy much greater potential rewards. The largest difference is resources. The second largest difference is politics. And with one, comes the other. Having lived on both sides of this street, there are advantages and disadvantages to each. Experience as either one is helpful preparation to be the other. Large companies acquire small companies all of the time and attempt to convert entrepreneurs into intrapreneurs with mixed results, but this is not what this discussion is about.

It is about the simple fact that being an intrapreneur is a terrific way to be an innovator. In person interactions, conferences and attending events do rule but for a lot less investment here are several important lessons.

1. Learn how to create and maintain relationships with people who can provide air cover. You are going to need it as soon as others are threatened by having to share resources, essentially immediately, as you can not begin without resources. You can not fake relationships. You have to care about the people who care about you. If you can not, life is going to very hard. And do not be duplicitous everyone can tell. You have to be authentic.
2. Expect to have to work just as hard as an entrepreneur just in different dimensions. Large organizations do not like to change even if they claim they want to. And no, you are not likely to get rich doing it internally. This means your motivation has to be more than money. You really have to want to make this happen as it will cost you personally unless you have enormous innovation vitality and resilience. Of course when you succeed, then you are a hero and it all feels worth it, but this may take a few years.
3. Try very hard to do this within an innovation culture. You can spend years and get no where if the values of the organization do not include supporting new ideas, tolerating mistakes, and valuing intangibles. It is not very likely that you are going to change a corporate culture just because you are present. The only company you can be sure to dramatically impact the culture of, is the one you are a founder of.
4. If you can, try to innovate in ways that are complimentary to what the company thinks their main business is. While this seems obvious, make sure you do know what business your enterprise is in and what business models it subscribes to.  Also be aware that people who help you are probably risking some political capital by taking you and your cause on. Their careers can be hurt. When you act, put yourself in the other persons place.
5. Search to identify and support proof points before you are asked for them. There have to be intermediate goals to spread the risk out over smaller steps. Make sure you can set and manage expectations, because things never turn out exactly how you expect them to and that is part of the fun. Innovation requires quite a bit of improvisation but even seasoned improvisors try to ascertain as quickly as possible what key and tempo they are playing in or cacophony results. Do anticipated homework before you are asked. Offer decision makers something they can say yes to.

There are plenty more lessons, but these basics can get you launched and for those of you who can make it to New York City this fall, each of the two conferences entrance fee is $1000 as an early bird, decent Manhattan rooms are usually upwards of $250 per night, even Air BnB is $100 or more, and plane tickets are another few hundred. Even parking a car is $50 or more per day. It is hard to get to any conference for less than one or two thousand dollars, not counting your time, but this could be a great place to start – ask your company to pay for you to go and explain why this is a great investment for them as you intend to shake things up and this will reduce the risk somewhat. If you do not have the courage to let your boss you are going to shake things up and ask for a couple of grand, perhaps you should rethink being an intrapreneur?

Innovative behavior is found within individuals who work in all walks of life, as it is a most basic human response to adapt to circumstances. This is the largest differentiator between people and other life forms, the degree to which we can adapt. We are so powerful at adapting that we also adapt our circumstances to fit our needs and desires. This innovation response is innate in humans of all ages, on every continent and both genders.

However it is not generally found in equal measure in all places, situations and circumstances and this is quite reasonable for innovation is not always an appropriate response. Sometimes tried and true responses are more beneficial to the organism whether it be a nation, a business  or an individual.

It is because of the very wide range of conditions people find themselves in that innovative behavior can reasonably vary so very much in frequency and strength. To shrink this range to one that is manageable we are addressing different professions conduciveness to innovation but before doing so noting the tendency for younger entities to innovate more than older entities. Children take more chances than adults. Young companies take more chances than mature ones.  A newly formed nations have more degrees of freedom than established ones. Innovation appears to be something that most of us unlearn.

There are professions that are more accepting and more requiring of innovation than other ones where it is generally agreed a more conservative approach serves us all with better results. Although innovation behavior can not really be arranged linearly, for purposes of brevity we are simplifying this characterization of innovation vitality.

Beginning at the end of the spectrum where there are enormous degrees of freedom available to practitioners we have performance artists. If the slowest average tempo for music is 60 beats per minute and performers rarely initiate less than one note per beat on average, the duration of each note event is only one second. During a 90 minute jazz performance (5400 seconds) an musician would play (initiate) a minimum of 5400 separate note events and in most cases performances include far more than this. This makes the importance of adhering to playing any given note the same way every time not very great. In fact as jazz is an improvised art form, one would be penalized for playing every note in the manner that was expected. Improvisers are expected to continually stream innovation in the form of trying new combinations of notes, harmonies and rhythms almost constantly. This is a profession in which innovation is not only acceptable but absolutely required.

At the opposite end of the spectrum lies an administrator of a very mature society or company where the expectations of the population being served is to not be surprised. The degrees of freedom constraining such a person are very small and reasonably so. We do not want the garbage to be picked up on Sunday at 2:37 AM when we thought it was being picked up on Wednesday at 7:30 AM. We would not know when to take it out to the curb. Businesses and municipalities demand high degrees of predictability and art demands relatively higher degrees of surprise.  In short we do not expect the same amount of surprise from our accountant or doctor as we do from a chef or performer.

The difference has to do with emotional engagement which tends to expect a different predicability to surprise ratio than intellectual engagement which tends to desire more predictability and less surprise. There are many fields that would not be recommended to overly emotional people and there also many fields that would not be recommended to one with a stringently analytical persona. Of course to some degree all of us have more than one mode of operation but most people have characteristics that tend to push us in specific directions. And yes we also can change over our lives and even during a single day or for some form minute to minute. Those that change from minute to minute would not run for president. Those that change over years not seconds, should not audition for jazz bands.

In gross terms we expect our leaders to be predictable and our lawyers to codify and memorialize rules we can count on so we can adhere to them. The ten commandments come to mind as having a very long run. People have felt it reasonable to subordinate themselves to these for millennia. We also expect people in the art and in ad agencies and marketing to surprise and delight  us.  Do our leaders sometimes surprise and delight us? Occasionally but mostly they disappoint us because we do not want them to detour from what they said they would do when we elected them or hired them.

It all has to do with what time constant is being operated upon. At we looking at seconds, hours, months or years. For some people planning their life more than open week at a time is totally impossible and for some going to a restaurant and ordering something new because what was desired is unavailable is extremely unwelcome.

There is not right or wrong, there is just a range just as ultraviolet is at one end of the visible electromagnetic spectrum with red at the other. It does not mean red is better than blue or yellow or green. We have a lot of colors and we also have a lot of kinds of innovator behavior.

If you want to improvise you had better not become a ballerina or anything else that expects you to do exactly and precisely what everyone expects. If you want no surprises there are many fields that would be unsuitable.

The places where creativity is most at home are the ones where someone can create their own world and then go live in it. Composers can create their open music and then go play it, computer programmers can create their own computer language and write programs in it. Video game coders can create their open us inverse and go live in it. Now all of these people can also bring others with them into their worlds as well and in order to be classified as an innovator not just a creator they need to.

Unfortunately those who are skilled at insight are not necessarily skilled at completion and vice-a-versa. This is why teams are generally needed for innovation to be adopted. Or even if there is a one person team, that person has to change modes of operation to accomplish the set of tasks required for their insight to be applied in the real world.

There is a psychological shrift that has to occur when changing modes and it can be unconscious for those lucky enough to smoothly flow from one set of tasks to another or it require or create huge upheaval in a persons state of mind to shift those gears.

Most research never makes it into products, most books that are began are not published, starting and finishing do not rehire the same skill set.  Accomplished people have to be capable of chaining these gears, to pay bills, take out trash and cook dinner. Even those of us who are leveraged are genially not born that way.

Being conscious of the innovation spectrum helps one to engage appropriate parties.

Innovators attempting to innovate generally experience resistance and this is not a bad thing. Change, unavoidable for progress is dangerous, and as such, requires risk prudence to insure it will be useful and valuable enough to justify. Innovators must repeatedly alter and justify their actions to iterate toward workable solutions. Although initial forays do not always succeed, they serve as foundations supporting subsequent efforts to achieve the critical mass required for change to occur. In other words, innovators are necessarily agents of change and as such need to rapidly determine boundaries they need to operate within in order to contribute value in any given situation.

Boundaries always exist, at times between departments, divisions, enterprises, markets and nations, but most often in terms of mental models, which usually arise to cope with political and fiscal realities. Everyone has to prioritize and categorize, sometimes rigidly and other times permitting degrees of freedom to exist. We all adhere to the constraints of the mental models we adopt, even if we are the creators of those models. These models exist to help us predict the future by limiting the unknown or unknowable. Models are not reality, and can change either more quickly or more slowly than reality does. Herein lies one inherent divide between decision makers and innovators – adherence to prior models. This chasm is regularly crossed by the two parties negotiating boundaries. This is not to say that decision makers are not innovators. Successful decision makers innovate to remain decision makers, but as change agents they have the responsibility to preserve and preside over smooth operations by prudently defending against less calibrated innovators. These two roles are relativistic because they are situation dependent.

Which side of the divide one finds themselves has to do with resource allocation. If the innovator is in charge of allocating larger organizational resources then they are also the decision maker but it is likely they will need to justify their actions to another decision maker above them. Presidents still report to boards or congress or someone. We all have to justify our actions not just to ourself but to others. And we all lead some of the time even if it is just ourselves.

As leaders, innovators and change agents, it is always useful to attempt to put yourself in the places of those above and below you in order to better understand  perceived and real needs, and perceived and real boundaries.  All of us are constantly adapting to both changing circumstances and the way in which others adapt to their changing circumstances. We do this to survive and each of us play all of the roles beginning at early ages. When a six year old is left to watch the family dog for even five minutes they begin to be faced by these issues. All people adapt – that is their job to adapt, grow and mange change. We are all in charge of some innovation some of the time. And we are all subject to others needs at the same time. Try to look all around you and above and below too whether you are adapting, changing, innovating, following or leading.

Most innovators desire impact — to make a lasting difference . There are ways to leverage our ability to be change agents. A most obvious one, is having enough money to hire a lot of people to work on your projects programs, companies and inventions. Another one, is having enough influence and charm to convince other stakeholders to participate in various ways. In all cases we are assuming the innovation initiative to be designed around valid and valuable insights which will be beneficial. Of course wealth and influence are not always applied in such a noble manner, but for our purposes SVII is presuming positive outcomes for the greater good.

What if there was a way to have 10 to 100 times the impact? For you to be 10 or100 times more effective than you currently are? Would you be interested? It has been often stated that we each have more potential than we exercise, that almost everyone is an underachiever in terms of potential. This brings up the issue of human potential which to my mind is the greatest existing resource. We have a very large number of other resource issues that consume our attention including but not limited to energy, air, water, money, overpopulation, food, species extinction but the single dominant resource that impacts all of them is the human resource. This is why much of the SVII community is focused upon human potential as a most impactful resource.

A long time member, friend of SVII, and Thought Leader – Bill Veltrop, has been a proponent of a concept he calls “Infinite Games” which are in turn played by “Infinite Players”. More information here: TheInfiniteGames | What Are Infinite Games. Bill has been busy developing and articulating systems and approaches that permit individuals and organizations to explore working toward being10 to 100 times more effective. GlobalGEA Manifesto – GlobalGEA.

I am not going to try to paraphrase Bill, as his words are available in other places (linked to above) but do feel the need to point out to individuals possessed of significant degrees of personal freedom including resources and flexibility, the possibility of radically amplifying their impact in part through first shifting their internal models to open to this possibility. Life is not linear. Our nervous systems which include our sensory apparatus and brains, are generally characterized in exponential terms. When our thoughts appear to progress linearly they are simply straight line approximations to the curved, nonlinear dimensionally vast universe we occupy. We sometimes express powerful innovations as being disruptive, but they are only disruptive to our linear models, not to reality. Breakthroughs often act as delimiters as they occur at the edges of linear hierarchical and categorical thinking. The act of attempting to reconcile what “we know” with “what we experience” frequently requires adapting or improvisation — also sometime called innovation.

In order to experience infinite multipliers where we change by a factor of 10 or 100, we have to first consider the possibility that we are in some way transcendent. This does not require a suspension of logic and adherence to mystical belief systems. Innovators are always transcending circumstances to achieve  breakthroughs. This is perfectly natural, normal and reasonable when we remember that we are nonlinear and exponential, and let go of some of our constraining mental models about who we are and what we are capable of. If you have any doubt -just watch small children for an hour and see just how “linear” they are. If they can go 100X so can adults – it is inherent in being human. We are all natural innovators with infinite degrees of freedom until we start thinking that we are not.