How to tell if your company is ready for intrapreneurship

- You may have a big idea that could dramatically improve the health of your organization. You might have fantasies of becoming the hero, for designing a disruptive new product, service, or process. But before you dive in or agree to leave your mainstream role at your company to join a skunkworks operation, take a look around. Is the environment right for you to be an entrepreneur? If not, you might waste your time, or worse, ruin your reputation within your organization. Start with the big picture. Has your CEO spoken publicly about innovation? Is it a core value discussed on your webpage? Are there resources to support intrapreneurship? For example, Google's 20% rule allows engineers to have one day a week to pursue whatever project they want. This is as much to lessen management control over creativity, as it is to encourage innovation, according to CEO Eric Schmidt. Corporate metrics can be signs of values. If key metrics support existing business lines, and don't leave room for cross departmental or cross-PNL improvements, your organization might be more of a group of small competitive teams making collaborate innovation really hard. You might still be able to try some creative things within one of those groups, but your ability to make a huge impact will be limited. You might also want to learn about others who have championed bold changes in the past, and see if they were successful, as well as how their initiatives are perceived in company lore. Are they held up as heroes, promoted and celebrated, even if some of their ideas didn't succeed? Or have they all left the company? I've worked with many large organizations that claim to want to innovate, but each executive is so worried about what the change could mean for his or her budget, staff, or revenues, that they'll pay lip service to the ideas, but then try to tank them behind the scenes. You also want to evaluate the unspoken cultural norms. For example, what happens when someone suggests a disruptive idea? If the idea is quickly shut down as too expensive or too hard, that's a bad sign. But if the idea is entertained, and even played with by the colleagues, or if the innovator is given the resources to develop a small test, those are good signs. But even if your organization has all kinds of innovation going on, your chances of success, can be affected by your own manager. How comfortable is she with new ideas? How highly does she think of you? Will she be inclined to advise you or at least support in your high risk, high reward project? Is your manager well-regarded and given room to innovate? Or are they low status in the organization and maybe even on the way out? You can be successful as an intrapreneur even in the most slow-moving of companies, and with the most ineffectual of managers. But you may be fighting an uphill battle, and one that's hard to win. That's why companies with innovation attract more innovators, while other organizations seem to lack anyone with bold new ideas. If you have an entrepreneurial mindset, you're going to be a lot happier and more successful at a company with a similar bent.