Seite - 235 - in Digital Entrepreneurship - Impact on Business and Society
Bild der Seite - 235 -
Text der Seite - 235 -
managers’ key performance indicators (KPIs). Human resources can assess the
sponsors’ performance are by asking successful intrapreneurs: ‘In your darkest
hour, among your management, who supported you and helped you deal with
whatever barriers were in yourway?’The individualsmentioned in the answer to
that question are the true sponsors. Then, counter-intuitively, when the good
sponsors are identified, they should not be celebrated.
Great sponsors give credit to everyone around them, so celebrating them pub-
liclywill annoyall theotherswhoendedupgetting credit forwhat the sponsordid.
Thiswill create jealousy and limit the sponsor’s future effectiveness. It is important
to value what good sponsors do, but this can be done by congratulating them
privately and, like succession planning, by keeping a secret list of good sponsors
andpromoting themwheneverpossible.As they rise, the true sponsors canbe even
moreeffective insupporting intrapreneursand theculture thatmakes themeffective.
Fourth, companiescanmeasure their innovationoutputs.At3M,division leaders
were held accountable for the number andquality of the innovations comingout of
their division. The innovations were graded by the company’s innovation rating
team fromminor improvements to those innovations that could create disruptive
products for years to come. The leaders were not prompted to be innovative
themselves. Toget a good innovation score, a division needed to foster a corporate
culture where intrapreneurs could thrive; this was measured using the innovation
output of each division. Thismade having high-quality intrapreneurs and sponsors
in their divisions valuable to general managers, who therefore created conditions
conducive to intrapreneuring.
The best sponsors are motivated intrinsically, rather than extrinsically. They
support intrapreneurs because they buy into the intrapreneurs’ ideas and passions.
Helping the intrapreneurs gives them meaning and provides them with valued
professional relationships. Themost effective sponsors are not driven by their ego.
In extreme cases, they might have already reached the highest level they could
expect toachieve in their career, sonowtheyaregivingback toyounger innovators
who remind them of their previous selves.
Manyprocessesaimedat innovation fail. Ideacontestsbringout lotsof ideasbut
rarely lead to successful implementation. The result is that they give hope to
numerous employees only to crush them eventually. Rather than increasing
employee engagement, they cause a short-lived increase in it followed by a
long-term decline.
Formalprocesses likeStage-Gate,whichat least intends toprovideapathway to
commercialisation, should work better. However, much too often, due to delays
between reviewcycles andanexcessive focusonsecondary information rather than
on the testing of quick prototypes and intrapreneur assessment, they tend to slow
down and halt innovation instead of accelerating it. They often become a process
that createsmoreways to say no and kill an idea rather than building a system for
supporting intrapreneurs.
Significantdecisionsaremadebycommittees,butnoonehastheabilitytodigdeep
enough tounderstand themostdifficult ideas.Committeesmayeliminatebad ideas,
242 G. Pinchot III andM. Soltanifar
Digital Entrepreneurship
Impact on Business and Society
- Titel
- Digital Entrepreneurship
- Untertitel
- Impact on Business and Society
- Autoren
- Mariusz Soltanifar
- Mathew Hughes
- Lutz Göcke
- Verlag
- Springer Verlag
- Ort
- Cham
- Datum
- 2021
- Sprache
- englisch
- Lizenz
- CC BY 4.0
- ISBN
- 978-3-030-53914-6
- Abmessungen
- 16.0 x 24.0 cm
- Seiten
- 340
- Schlagwörter
- Entrepreneurship, IT in Business, Innovation/Technology Management, Business and Management, Open Access, Digital transformation and entrepreneurship, ICT based business models
- Kategorie
- International