Page - 251 - in Digital Entrepreneurship - Impact on Business and Society

Toget into the accelerator, the participants had to form teams of three ormore members, who would all be committed to the same idea. This was done to encourage team leaders to assemble their groups and form ideas thatwere good enough to attract at least twomoremembers. Twelve teams progressed to the accelerator. 3. ThePathway to Intrapreneuringwasaquick six-weekonline accelerator for the innovation projects coming out of the Idea Expo. Eachweek, there were brief lectures and readings on an aspect of intrapreneuring and building a business plan.The teams receivedweeklyassignments andwere required towrite reports about how their groupwould address certain strategic issues. The assignment types included elevator pitches, building and testing rapid prototypes,managing the organisational immune system, designing and testing a business model, checking up on teamwork, developing marketing and sales plans, fostering the intrapreneurial spirit, making financial projections, and so on.At the endof eachweek, the teamspresented theirworkonline to twoother teams,who then gave them feedback using structured forms.At the end of the accelerator, teams presented their results to a panel of executives. Six teams were funded to continueworking on their innovations. 4. The Journey to Intrapreneuringwas a twelve-week implementation workshop for the teams that were funded to develop their ideas. Asmentioned above, within the first year after the participants graduated from the Journey to Intrapreneuring, the programmehad already produced a ten-to-one return on all the resources invested in it. Because of word of mouth, thirty more teams applied for the next round of the accelerator. What was learned from this experiment? 1. There is a vast reservoir of creative talent and intrapreneurial spirit buried in IT departments. 2. If you demonstrate that there is a safe pathway to bring one’s ideas to man- agement andget support for them,manydigital intrapreneurswill appear.There are far potential digital intrapreneurs buried in most organisations than their management suspects. 3. The means for releasing digital innovations can itself be a digital innovation. The first two courses were delivered almost entirely as pieces of software running on a server. 4. Training intrapreneurial employees who had already been developing their innovative ideas in their own time, rather than starting with generating ideas, producedmuch faster and better results. This was achieved by selecting teams that had already chosen their ideas. There are generallymore than enoughgood ideas distributed among the employee population at all times. 5. Implementation, and not idea generation, is the rate-limiting step in the inno- vationprocess.Many successful ideas had been around for quite some timebut had previously lacked a pathway to implementation. 258 G. Pinchot III andM. Soltanifar