Technology alone won’t change an organization, but people might.

Last week Forbes featured our upcoming course on Social Intrapreneurship in a post on 2014’s Most Valuable Employee: The Social Intrapreneur. While we’ve posted in the past on how businesses are already being redefined to enact change (TechChange is a registered B-Corp), it is increasingly it is individual intrapreneurs that are innovating within organizations to implement start-up practices and catalyze innovation. The timing is fortunate, as the old model of how to fit employees into an established organizational model is undergoing a fundamental redesign.

A recent Economist special report on tech startups stated: “[T]he world of startups today offers a preview of how large swathes of the economy will be organised tomorrow.” Organizations that thrive will not be the ones with passive employees, but rather those with team members able to adapt organizational processes around the possibilities of ever-improving technology. However, as we’ve covered in our World Bank animation (Why Is It So Hard to Try Something New in ICT4D?), these increasingly rapid technological disruptions of “sexy gadgets” still require individuals to manage organizational change.

Fortunately, you won’t have to figure it out alone. Since our last update, we have two additional speakers that can share their experiences. Ken Banks (@kiwanja), founder of FrontlineSMS and author of a new book on The Rise of the Reluctant Innovator, or even FCC CIO David Bray (@fcc_cio), a prodigy of government IT who started his first federal gig at 15.

Class starts Feb. 24. We hope you’ll join us. Apply now!

What is Intrapreneurship?

A Beginner’s Introduction to Institutional Innovation

Written by Joe Agoada and Jennifer Estevez, Co-facilitators of TC108a: Intro to Intrapreneurship

Intrapreneurship defined

In·tra·pre·neur·ship (n) 1) Successful adaptation of entrepreneurial attitudes and strategies inside of a bureaucratic organization. 2) Implementation of start-up practices within a large organization, producing valued innovation.

Where does the term intrapreneurship come from?

The word “intrapreneurship” sounds like a new term, but it in fact has some history to it. The term was first discussed in a 1978 piece by Gifford and Elizabeth Pinchot titled “Intra-Corporate Entrepreneurship (Some Thoughts Stirred Up by Attending Robert Schwartz’s School for Entrepreneurs)”. Norman Macrae’s 1982 Economist article, “We’re all Intrapreneurial Now” further explores intrapreneurship and gives naming credit to the Pinchots. However, the word seems to have gone into relative hibernation until the dot.com bubble burst and Silicon Valley innovators started to look beyond the newest internet start-up for growth in the technology sector.

Intrapreneurship vs. entrepreneurship, per Guy Kawasaki

For a modern understanding of intrapreneurship, we can look at one of its most vocal proponents: author, motivational speaker, and venture capitalist Guy Kawasaki. Kawasaki was an early employee at Apple and a “chief evangelist” at the company for years.  With his 2004 book, Art of the Start, he began making direct references to intrapreneurs and has recently become a more vocal advocate. For example, he wrote this  July 2013 blog post on LinkedIn on “The Art of Intrapreneurship”. Here’s an excerpt:

  • “There are lots of guys and gals inside established companies who are as innovative and revolutionary as their bootstrapping, soy-sauce-and-rice-subsisting, external entrepreneur counterparts. This is for these brave souls who face a different kind of reality and must practice the art of entrepreneurship inside a company—or “intrapreneurship.'”
  • “From the outside looking in, entrepreneurs think intrapreneurs have it made: ample capital, infrastructure (desks, chairs, Internet access, assistants, lines of credit, etc), salespeople, support people, and an umbrella brand. Guess again. Intrapreneurs don’t have it better; they simply have it different. Indeed, the reality is that they probably have it worse because they are fighting against ingrained, inbred, and inept management.” – Guy Kawasaki

Bottom line: intrapreneurship is difficult, challenging, and nuanced.

Defining intrapreneurship: the starting point to inspiring institutional innovation

 Understanding exactly what intrapreneurship is can be a starting point in igniting growth and innovation within institutions. Harnessing the intrapreneurial approach can empower workers of any generation to advance their careers while improving their organizations. Intrapreneurship is especially helpful for junior-level employees and mid-level managers wanting to overcome the obstacles associated with getting consensus and support for innovative new ideas in the workplace. Getting employees to understand the concept of intrapreneurship is the first step to empowering a new cadre of innovators within institutions; nurturing intrapreneurship just may be the key to powering the global economy forward.


Learn more about intrapreneurship.

Join us with Ashoka Changemakers and other past, current, and aspiring intrapreneurs across the world that are sharing and learning the tools and techniques to innovate within their organizations for social change in TC108: Social Intrapreneurship – Innovation Within Institutions. The course begins February 24 – March 21, 2014. Enroll now to lock in your early bird discount and group rate!

 

About Joe Agoada

Joseph Agoada is the Resource Mobilization Coordinator for the UNICEF New York HQ Social and Civic Media Section in the Division of Communication. He has held this post since August of 2011 when he also founded and launched UNICEF-GIS. Prior he implemented UNICEF’s World Cup in My Village in Rwanda and Zambia. Between 2008 and 2009 he worked directly for Amy Smith, founder of the MIT D-Lab as a course administrator and then conference organization for the 2009 International Development Design Summit. In 2008 he was named an International Youth Foundation a Global YouthActionNet Fellow and in 2012, and a Google Personal Democracy Forum Fellow. He is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and currently resides in Washington, D.C.

The end of the year is now upon us. We just wanted to thank you from the bottom of our hearts and the top of our DC nerd attic for making 2012 our best one yet. Specifically, thanks to your course feedback, content contributions, happy hour attendance, and tuition dollars, we’ve trained over 1,400 participants in 70 countries in how to better use technology for social change.

New Online Courses:
We have expanded on our original set of courses (Emergency Management, Digital Organizing, and Mobiles for International Development) into exciting new spaces. A few courses we’d like to highlight:

  • (TC309) Mobile Phones and Public Health: Our largest open enrollment course so far, we were joined by over 100 students in 25 countries. Developed in partnership with the UN Foundation’s mHealth Alliance, we also piloted our new in-course tool simulator for D-Tree!
  • USAID Courses on Mobile Money: Through a custom course for 80 USAID mission staff in 7 countries, we’re helping build development capacity in mobile phones. Next up? Turning this course into a self-paced interactive module to scale the program.
  • TOL Journalist Training for “Reporting on Education” in E. Europe: Developed in partnership with Transitions Online (TOL), BBC, and The Guardian, we shared our platform with TOL to train 20 journalists over a 2-week period. This was our first course ever with non-TechChange content and external facilitators!
  • (TC201) Ushahidi: Frameworks for Effective Platform Management: Expanding on our “Emergency Management” course, we developed this course in partnership with Ushahidi to be a scalable complement to the Universities 4 Ushahidi program (U4U).
  • (TC108) Technology, Innovation, and Social Entrepreneurship: Developed in partnership with the Amani Institute, we wanted to not just teach content, but develop more social entrepreneurs to keep pushing the field forward.

Online-Enabled Public Events:
One of our initiatives this year has been to assist our partners in reaching a larger online audience and to start thinking of all public events as online-first. Events include:

  • International Conference of Crisis Mappers at the World Bank: We worked together with Crisis Mappers to produce the first livestreaming of ICCM, which led to an additional 950 unique viewers from all over the world!
  • Connecting Grassroots to Government at the Wilson Center: Building on our work for empowering Volunteer Technical Communities (VTCs), we took live questions from the online audience during this event. This was one of multiple events at the Wilson Center, which is leading the way in online-enabled events.
  • Expert Interviews at the mHealth Summit: Since the webcast was already provided, we focused on capturing expert knowledge from the attendees and partners for the mHealth Alliance. Most fun part? Getting pictures of attendees holding their cell phones to show their personal connection with the device.

Site Upgrades and Added Features:
In addition to a few other handy features, we’ve made a few big technical upgrades to our site in the hopes of improving user experience.

  • Launched a new, responsive TechChange.org! We much of 2011 promoting mobile-first design, so it was a relief to build a fully responsive site in 2012. Try re-sizing it in your browser!
  • Animating our content voiceovers. We’ve always been big fans of RSA Animate and iheed who produce educational video content, so we tried giving it a go ourselves. What do you think? We’re hoping to do plenty more in 2013.
  • Video-for-everyone course design. We switched from Ustream to OpenTok in 2012 to try to not just talk at our classes, but have discussions with you. It’s been a bumpy ride, but we’re working at optimizing for every browser and bandwidth.

Field Training and Workshops:
Tech training cannot be done by Internet alone. Here’s a few cases where we rolled up our sleeves and got to teaching the old fashioned way.

Finally, a particular highlight of the past year was the nice story run about us in The Economist. Read the article: Geeks for Good.

We hope to see you online, in person, or in class next year!

Warm regards,

The TechChange Team