Businesses need to embrace corporate entrepreneurship

Corporate entrepreneurship is the new buzz word in the corporate circles and innovation is becoming the difference between successful and dormant organisation.

A story is told of a company that introduced an innovation award scheme to spur entrepreneurship within the organisation.

This award was to be bestowed upon the employee who by the end of the year had forwarded the highest number of novel ideas to the innovation department for scrutiny and implementation.

To the amazement of many employees in the company, the first winner of the award was the company’s receptionist who by the end of the year had forwarded five innovative ideas and three had already been implemented.

Senior executives with higher qualifications and years of experience together with other staff were shocked and eager to know the magic behind her success.

Acceptance speech

The concept she used was delivered during the acceptance speech and was as simple as she looked.

“I used to take note of every customer complain and feedback, asked them how they would want our company to improve our products, documented the feedback and then forwarded them to the innovation department in a weekly bases,” she said.

Although we seem to believe that the youth in Kenya need entrepreneurship skills just to start small businesses, medium sized and large organisations need to understand that entrepreneurial attitude and behaviour should be embraced within their processes if they have to endure the competition onslaught in the 21st century.

This thought was captured well by Pinchot when he coined the term intrepreneurship or what is also called corporate entrepreneurship insisting that entrepreneurship should not only take place externally but also within the organisations.

This is not difficult as argued by Peter Drucker in his book Innovation and Entrepreneurship because both individual and organisation enterprise development is based on the same principle whether outside or within the organisation.

Daily strategy

But although the term corporate entrepreneurship is three decades old, many organisations remain behind in enhancing innovation within the firm because it calls for the change of the pre-existing structures and processes which many managers are unwilling to embrace.

From to Motorola to Nokia and now Apple and Samsung, the difference has always been innovation and our organisations should realise that even the most dominant firm can be edged out of the business in a blink of an eye if innovation is not part of their daily strategy in a world where technological change is not serial but spontaneous.

Dr Kabata is an entrepreneurship and innovation expert.