How to Encourage Intrapreneurship at your company

It is important for companies to know how to encourage intrapreneurship. For people who are in leadership positions, it is crucial to get people to think like an entrepreneur. This is a key element in helping a company keep a competitive edge over their competition. Intrapreneurship is when a person works for a company and behaves like an entrepreneur. If used correctly, this can be an outstanding tool, both for the people who come up with good ideas and the companies that promote them. The employee can benefit because their ideas can come to fruition without them having to quit their job and risk their livelihood to achieve their dream. The company can benefit because it allows them to keep their best and brightest employees while also taking advantage of their creativity. Let's take a look at some of the ways you can encourage intrapreneurship in your organization:

1. Give employees time and space
It is not realistic to expect your employees to come up with dynamic new ideas if they are still bogged down with all of their normal duties. Therefore, you will need to make sure they have sufficient time and space with which to be creative and let their imagination flow. Schedule a specific day or week for them to devote their time and energy solely to the creative process.

2. Talk about what problems need to be solved
New ideas are great, but you ideally want your employees to only focus their time and energy on ideas that will benefit your company directly. This is why it is important for you to sit down with your employees and discuss the current problems at your company that need to be solved. You should also describe the types of ideas you are looking for. This will give your employees a direction and a baseline with which to work. If you fail to give your people any guidelines, you will most likely get many ideas that your company is unable to implement.

3. Always recognize and praise people for good ideas
The way you encourage intrapreneurship can vary from company to company, but people always want to feel appreciated for their hard work and creativity. This is true no matter what type of business you are working in. Therefore, you need to be sure that employees who come up with excellent ideas are always given the recognition they deserve. If employees feel they are not properly recognized for their efforts, they will not have much motivation to go the extra mile and think of new ideas in the future.