Seite - 232 - in Digital Entrepreneurship - Impact on Business and Society

initiative. The innovation itself can be a new digital product like Google’s email client orAmazon’s cloud storage; however, it canalsobeexemplifiedby theuseof digital technology to dowhat the company already does, but better, cheaper, and faster. The latter kindof innovation is themost important formofdigital innovation for companies in traditional industries. For such companies, digital innovation is not about new digital products or services but rather about the better ways tomarket, relate tocustomers, createoperational efficiencies, anduseexponential technologies suchas3Dprintingorgenomics toperformthecurrentprocessesmuchbetter, faster, and cheaper. For example, digital intrapreneurship includes using AI to optimise scheduling in a trucking firm or image interpretation in health care. It can also be used to market non-digital products, such as Amazon’s online sales of physical products,ordesignanewphysicalproduct, suchasanewmedicationoranairplane. Muchof the innovationofBoeing777wasdoneusingdigital tools,which allowed to rapidly design a better integrated airplane, thereby streamlining production. Continual improvement of operational processes is still best doneusing the total qualitymethod and its descendants likeSixSigma; however, breakthroughprocess improvements are mostly done by digital intrapreneurs. If one looks closely at continual improvement processes, one will often find that they create an environ- ment where employees express a higher degree of initiative that resembles an intrapreneurial spirit. Google’s use of ML to improve their language translation services is good example of a radical product improvement made possible by digital intrapreneur- ship. Googlewas already deliveringmachine translation to customers; however, a small team of intrapreneurs overrode the traditional methods of its translation engines with a statistical ML approach. The outcome of this decision was an exponential improvement in the quality of translation,whichwas so striking that it causedGoogle topromptly stopworkingon improvements reliantonoldermethods (Lewis-Kraus 2016). Quite often, digital intrapreneurship offers innovation opportunities that can createmajor transformations in terms of efficiency or customer relationshipwith a verymodest investment. This creates a large number of high return-on-investment (ROI) intrapreneurial opportunities by developing personalised customer relation- ships, collaboratingwith suppliers, takingmore data-driven decisions, automating diagnostics, managing natural resources like energy or water, and optimising logistics and process control. Digital intrapreneurs are employees who use their entrepreneurial spirit for the benefit of their employer and simultaneously to give meaning to their work by implementing their ideas to produce impactful digital innovations. Digital intrapreneursmust possess the skills to identify newdigital-technology- enabled business opportunities and bring them to fruition, either as a new concept Digital Intrapreneurship: The Corporate Solution… 239