Page - 235 - in Digital Entrepreneurship - Impact on Business and Society

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