Kissing frogs

A good piece in the Economist this week about the benefits of ‘intrapreneurship’:

Some management writers have tried to take the idea of entrepreneurship into big organisations, encouraging full-time employees (on monthly salaries and the promise of a pension) to think like entrepreneurs. The idea has been dubbed “intrapreneurship”. One definition says that intrapreneurship is “the introduction and implementation of a significant innovation for the firm by one or more employees working within an established organisation”.

The selling of the Post-It note (see article) by Spence Silver, an employee of 3M, is one of the classic and most quoted examples of intrapreneurship. 3M has been particularly successful at encouraging intrapreneurs. It maintains that the first thing you have to do is to create a corporate culture which permits ideas to blossom. “You have to kiss a lot of frogs to find the prince,” the company told The Economist. “But remember, one prince can pay for a lot of frogs.”

You can read the full article here.