The League of Intrapreneurs awards highlighted growing impact of entrepreneurs creating change from within organisations.
A social entrepreneur, setting up his or her own enterprise from scratch, certainly faces daunting challenges, from financing to marketing. However, the degree of freedom afforded to social entrepreneurs is second to none. They don't have to operate within complex, established networks, win over colleagues or take risks that – even if successful – might not generate extra revenue for the business.
Conversely, to operate as a social entrepreneur within an established profit-making organisation often requires getting management to treat you, and your definition of success, differently. Not only that but the job descriptions for the roles many of these people want simply don't exist: you have to create your own job. Again, it's not easy and it takes a degree of chutzpah bordering on the disruptive. Not for nothing are such people sometimes better referred to as troublemakers. But I prefer to call them "changemakers" – these are social intrapreneurs.
In my own case, I run an organisation called Accenture Development Partnerships, which I set up 10 years ago to bring Accenture's services within the reach of NGOs and partners in developing countries. Staff take a salary reduction, we're not-for-profit but we're not-for-loss. But this is not CSR. Not a big deal you might think? Hardly revolutionary?
But you'd be missing the point. I believe that small changes can set off chain reactions, especially when large organisations with a lot of influence are concerned. Last week, at the inaugural League of Intrapreneurs Awards hosted by Ashoka Changemakers to mark the announcement of the winners, we heard that these small changes are heralding a quiet revolution.
Take Graham Simpson, from GSK, as an example of last week's winners. Simpson has a PhD in chemistry and is an extremely busy research scientist. But while on a six-month placement in Kenya he was struck by how many people there die from easily treatable diseases mainly through the lack of effective diagnosis. So he got in touch with the head of research and development at GSK and pitched the idea of developing cheap, yet commercial, diagnostics kits that could be used by often untrained health workers in rural villages, sometimes miles from hospitals. GSK is now working with John Hopkins University to develop the kits.
Meanwhile, Sacha Carina van Ginhoven is interested in how satellite technology might solve a problem she came across when talking to a friend who was living in a slum in Kibera, India. Millions of small businesses exist in slums worldwide but few have formal addresses, making it difficult to send and receive goods. So Van Ginhoven and her colleagues from TNT Express collaborated with slum residents to study existing supply chains. Results showed that the main challenges lay in recognising locations and enabling secure payments. But these could be overcome by targeting mobile phones. As a result, TNT Express developed a solution for slum deliveries. Working under the umbrella of the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD), TNT Express worked with Vodafone to explore how best to merge logistics with telecommunications.
These two examples share some aspects: firstly, many of the people involved had the specialist knowledge to identify the solution to a problem that had been brought home to them personally. The second was that many of them had "air-cover" in the shape of senior management in their respective organisations. This is something that Professor David Grayson, at the Doughty Centre at Canfield University, calls the "godfather" effect.
Ideas do not necessarily have to originate with chief executives but it is important to the success of a programme that senior leadership buys in from an early stage. It was particularly pleasing therefore that both Sir Richard Branson and GSK's Sir Andrew Witty sent personal messages of support to the finalists before the awards.
The last similarity, though, is perhaps the most obvious: sheer hard work. All the finalists admitted that, especially in the early stages, their intrapreneurship had to be squeezed in after hours or on weekends. There is probably little to be done about this.
Part of the point of intrapreneurship that it's not divorced from the intrapreneur's core job. Even so, with expertise, senior support and hard work there is no reason why this quiet revolution can't change the way we think about development and its catalysts.
Posted by Gib Bulloch
Gib Bulloch is founder and executive director at Accenture Development Partnerships. Her Tedx talk
"Be the change you want to see in your company" can be viewed here.
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