Intrapreneurs were a big thing the last 3 to 5 years as legacy companies tried to compete with the disruptors and absorb individuals with a growth mindset and seed them inside a stale environment. The hope was that the tenacity of these individuals would be able to transform the company from dinosaur to dinosaur unicorn.
That led to the sudden sprouting of innovation labs like mushrooms after rain. And as quickly as mushrooms grow, the labs also withered and died as fast from the lack of direction and overly optimistic and naive thinking on the part of the management.
Curiously enough with the disruptors maturing and becoming behemoths themselves (FAANG in the US and BAT in China), I wonder if the opposite trend would hold true where startups would want to employ corporate beancounters to set up their processes. Intrapreneurs are good at breaking down walls and barriers between silos and hopefully connect the pieces to build a new business model. The entreaucrat(?)would help set up walls and processes to reduce waste in the business? (Or minimally something for people to lean on?)
What I’ve noticed is that startups are moving from one business model to the next quickly yet when they find the right one they are unable to scale quickly due to the lack of structure and process. At this juncture it may be good to hire a veteran to head in to implement change management and slowly build up a structure and allow it to settle. The whole corporate lifecycle starts over again:
