5 Tips to Ensure Successful Coaching of Intrapreneurs

1. Don’t Sieve Out Ideas to Soon

First of all, it is important to begin somewhere, or as Simon Sinek points out 'Dream big. Start small. But most importantly start.'

That is what you would want to communicate to an intrapreneur as they start out with their idea or project. While a strategic fit is definitely important in corporate innovation, an initial idea has plenty of room to mature and transform during its first few months. 

Let's look at an example: Imagine for a moment, that a project went from its original idea – a laundry sensor that announces when your laundry machine has completed its washing  cycle, to a business-focused B2B «plug and play» analytics solution.

That's quite the turn, right? And one which could not have been anticipated from the beginning.

It is your task as a coach to give the innovator certain inputs regarding a possible pivot of their idea. It is important however, to avoid forcing the intrapreneur to shape their existing idea so that it fits the company right from the onset.

As in our example, What starts out as a particular idea might shape into something transformative for the company only later on in the process, and that's also okay.

2. Kill Your Darlings if They Don’t Work Out

While you might be thinking that this point stands in contrast to the point above; it is crucial to remember that it takes quite some months before anyone is able to rate someone to be 'fit' enough as an intrapreneur. In the spirit of KICKBOX, everybody (and their idea) should get a fair chance, up to a certain point.

While it is key here to ensure the first phases of the program are designed in a way that offers the innovator adequate support, to allow them to both validate their idea and their entrepreneurial ability; it should be noted that when the time comes, the idea is evaluated in an objective way. 

Even when an idea might seem worth pursuing, it is important for you to look at it objectively, and veto it if you see that the innovator behind it can’t rise up to the challenge.

From our own experience, passing the idea off to someone else in these early stages rarely yields successful results. It's better to bite the bullet, and kill the idea earlier rather than later, to avoid it sucking up resources unnecessarily.

3. Say Goodbye to the Solution and Start With the Problem

It is often observed that an intrapreneur starts a specific project with a very clear vision of what the end product should look like. While there is no problem with this persé, it is important that the innovator understands the concept of not falling in love with their solution too early on, and instead focusing on the problem first.

As a coach, there are two ways of approaching this situation:

Offer genuine advice:

Strongly advise the intrapreneur to review their starting position and validate it with user research (surveys, interviews, secondary research), to ensure that the optimal solution, based on data-driven insights is found.

OR

Help the innovator to construct a prototype:

Should your guidance of relinquishing the solution go unheard, you can help the innovator to construct a prototype. While this might not be the route they were expecting to take so early on in the process, it will certainly bring them back to the reality of hard facts so that they can move on as quick as possible.

Important: You're there to enable the innovator to learn – despite the route which they decide to take. Therefore, refrain from providing your personal judgment on whether the solution is deemed good or bad, as ultimately, you may not have all the necessary insights to make that determination either.

4. The Intrapreneur Must be Given the Chance to Address a Strategic Challenge

Along your journey of coaching and mentoring innovators, you will come across projects that have the potential of having a great strategic impact for the organization.

While it might at first seem impossible for just one person to influence significant strategic decisions, especially when those projects involve core business decisions that typically fall under management's purview, don't underestimate the power of small beginnings.

Your role as a coach and mentor in this scenario, should be to sharply outline the project’s first two months so that the innovator can be realistic on what is possible and what might not be.

In turn, this process can also provide management with a fresh perspective on the strategic project and potentially lead to their support and involvement in the intrapreneur's initiative.

5. There’s no Need for a Functional Prototype to Test Market Demand

There's no doubt that putting wood behind the arrow is always a good idea. Yet, this might not be the case during the first few months of starting out to validate an idea. All that is needed during this period, is for the innovator to prove to themselves and to their  potential sponsor that they have come across a true market opportunity. For this, there's no need for a functional prototype just yet. Instead, this could indicate that the intrapreneur’s idea is too complex and that there are way too many things to consider at once.

As their coach, you should help the innovator, both to recognize the complexity, and to extract the idea’s core elements aka the value proposition.

Propose a plan for the intrapreneur to instead, plan to test for market demand (do it via smoke tests, interviews etc.). Explain to them that a sound value proposition will more likely provide the required budget for building a functional prototype during a later phase (the proof of concept (POC) phase). Laying it out like this to the innovator, usually resonates well with them.

Coaching intrapreneurs along their innovation journey can come with its fair share of hurdles. As their mentor, it is important: to remind them that setbacks and challenges are a natural part of the process; that sometimes taking a step back to evaluate the situation objectively can provide valuable insights; and most importantly, to encourage them in their endeavour.