The recent pandemic has caused a series of events that have left businesses facing intense uncertainty. There is no guaranteed formula or best practice when every business is dealing with uncertainty, no matter how well they are doing. We may do something right for a while, but things can turn around faster than we expect.
Whenever we face change, our behaviour shifts with it. The way we make decisions to purchase and do everyday activities has changed because of the economic crisis caused by the pandemic.
While innovation is one way to understand behavioural shifts and answer our customers’ changing needs, it can also be a strain on the resources of an organisation at an already difficult time. But let’s take a step back and look at the bigger picture.
One of the many reasons that organisations find it difficult to move with change is the rigid culture they’ve built. Although rigid isn’t wrong, it isn’t sustainable for the business’s future. Entrepreneurs, on the other hand, move with agility amid change and disruption, but they have their own set of challenges — limited capital and resources.
Larger organisations may have fewer issues with resources and capital, but they may come up short when it comes to entrepreneurial people. This is where “intrapreneurship” becomes crucial in both driving innovation and moving the business forward.
Intrapreneurship means being an entrepreneur inside an organisation. This works when people in the organisation develop entrepreneurial skills such as creativity and risk-taking.
The truth is, it is difficult to develop those skills if we do not encourage them in the organisation. It takes practice to ultimately create a culture of intrapreneurship. But we need to begin somewhere, so here are the entrepreneurial skills to develop for effective innovation within the organisation.
The first skill is customer-centrism. In any initiative you take toward innovation, always go back to what your customers need. They may not all be external, because some of us serve internal customers. For example, the main role of HR is to attract new talent while still engaging with existing staff.
The second skill is networking and connection. An entrepreneur needs to build connections for future business ventures; the same goes for intrapreneurs. In any initiative we pursue, we cannot work alone. We must build stronger relationships with our own people and our external customers to build trust and understanding. With trust and understanding, we have the right insights to work toward innovating the products and services to answer customer needs.
The third skill is active listening. This skill is basic to both customer-centrism and networking because without it, you cannot build stronger relationships with the necessary stakeholders. It may sound easy, but active listening is far from it. While we naturally hear things, we’re usually listening passively. We’re not truly listening to understand if we are not fully engaged in our listening.
The fourth skill is agility and resilience. In today’s uncertain climate, changes happen very quickly. While organisations need to continue to innovate, we need to do it fast. But with innovation, failure can still happen, so resilience is paired with agility. With failure comes a lesson, but we need to find the lesson fast and get back on track.
The fifth skill is creative problem-solving. Innovation isn’t simply solving a problem; it is about solving complex issues both internally and externally in the most creative and cost-effective ways. Intrapreneurs should be able to catch the problem quickly (agility), ideate solutions, and prototype working models to answer the needs of customers.
The final skill is story-telling and pitching. Innovation is a process of coming up with newer ideas and solutions. The idea of “new” for large organisations that are usually rigid in their processes can be daunting. Intrapreneurs need to be able to communicate and pitch their ideas in persuasive ways to gain the favour from those who are usually rigid.
While the skills required as an intrapreneur aren’t limited to the ones I’ve just outlined, they can act as a base to add upon, depending on your organisation’s direction. Though seemingly time-consuming, building intrapreneurs in your organisation is beneficial in two major ways. One, you build up people to become more independent and drive the organisation forward. Two, you bring out greater potential in people, who will then be able to take your business even further during tough times.
The key to organisational innovation has always been people. Let’s begin with the people inside our organisations to sustain our business for the future.
Arinya Talerngsri is Chief Capability Officer and Managing Director at SEAC - Southeast Asia’s Lifelong Learning Center. She can be reached by email at arinya_t@seasiacenter.com or https://www.linkedin.com/in/arinya-talerngsri-53b81aa. Explore and experience our lifelong learning ecosystem today at https://www.yournextu.com