Intrapreneurship and Benchmarking

Where large businesses enable employees and managers to demonstrate entrepreneurial behaviour in their work to the benefit of their employer.

• Entrepreneurial activity by employees and managers
• Most of the rewards go to the company
• Risk taken by the company

• Structured time away from work to allow employees and managers to develop business ideas.
• Build cross functional teams to lead innovation projects.
• Secondment of staff to smaller businesses or startups.
• Staff competitions and innovation days such as hackathons.

• Complacency and arrogance
• Bureaucracy
• Reward systems do not provide incentive to improve
• Short-termism

• Senior management support such as mentoring
• Clear communication which encourages and celebrates new ideas
• A culture of innovation and creativity
• Rewards systems such as offering financial and other incentives for innovation
• Resources to support ideas

• Gmail was developed by employees at Google who were allowed time off from work to focus on personal projects.
• The PlayStation was developed by a Sony employee who spent hours fiddling with his daughter's Nintendo to make it more powerful and user friendly.

The objective of benchmarking is to understand and evaluate the current position of a business or organisation in relation to best practice and to identify areas and means of performance improvement.

• 1: Understand in detail existing business processes.
• 2: Analyse the business processes of others.
• 3: Compare own business performance with others.
• 4: Implement steps necessary to close performance gaps.

Strategic: Examines the long-term strategies and general approches that have enabled high performers to succeed.

Performance or Competitive: Consider position in relation to performance charcteristics of key products and services.

Process: Comparing against best practice organisations that perform similar work or deliver similar processes.

Functional: Comparing with partners drawn from different business sectors to find ways of improving work processes.

Internal: Benchmarking businesses or operations within the organisation, such as business units in different countries.

External: Analysing outside organisations simply known as "best in the class".