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Innovate from within
Companies are empowering staff at all levels of authority to contribute key ideas and strategies – and the resulting ‘intrapreneurs’ can benefit businesses in multiple ways, writes Ben Lobel
I
n lean times, new and fresh ideas are king, and if your company promotes an environment that encourages
innovation from all levels of the hierarchy, the perks can be manifold. From affording staff more freedom in their role to having the chance to invest in an employee’s innovation, instilling a culture of ‘intrapreneurship’ can be a good idea on many levels. Steve Newhall, managing director of talent
management consultancy DDI UK, says that one of the challenges organisations face today is that the ‘half-life’ of good ideas just gets shorter and shorter – meaning more and more are needed. He explains, ‘Whereas 15 years ago a
good idea may have given you five or ten years of revenue stream, that may not be the case today. You have to generate more ideas, more quickly to stay ahead of the curve and stay competitive. So creating an environment in which that can happen is necessary for all organisations.’
A culture of innovAtion
This is the ethos at accounting software systems company Access UK. CTO Stuart Allsopp says, ‘We like to instil a culture of innovation all the way through the company, and we encourage breaking the boundaries of a job role [to encompass the generation of new ideas], because we get the brightest ideas from the people at the coalface doing the job.’
18 business xl Access UK employee David Humphreys
started in the support department helping resolve customer issues, but was given the opportunity to develop several software projects after he identified potential
‘You have to talk to the team within your business and let
them know that the door is open for new ideas, and once you do that you’ll be amazed at what can come through’
opportunities where Access could improve its customer experience. After demonstrating a prototype for mobile
software he had produced in his own time, Humphreys was given time to work on the project, which led to a job being created for him in the development team, allowing him to continue and extend the software. The utilities that Humphreys developed
have improved the customer experience, helping to reduce the number of customer support calls, and improved efficiency, making support engineers’ jobs at the company easier. By encouraging an intrapreneurial culture,
Allsopp says that he receives seven or eight ideas a year from staff that are worth thinking about commercially. He adds, ‘While we don’t
allow them to drop everything and get on with it, we give them a little rope and see where it can go. ‘As a manager you have to talk to the
team within your business and let them know that the door is open for new ideas, and once you do that you’ll be amazed at what can come through.’
Good to shAre
While intrapreneurship can mean affording your staff the freedom to come up with new ideas for the company, it can also mean giving employees the chance to start ‘sub-businesses’ of their own. Recruitment company Eximius Group
uses an Enterprise Management Incentives share scheme system whereby recruiters in the firm can opt to reinvest a proportion of the profit they generate into hiring people to help them build their revenues further. If they hit their revenue targets over a three- year period they are awarded 20 per cent of the shares in the ‘business’ they have built, the value of which can be realised at the point of a planned equity sale a few years down the line. The resulting atmosphere is one in which
staff employed on an equity share scheme effectively create their own business and revenue stream, employing more and more people to help as they grow, and are subsequently paid on the top line revenue
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