Some of the biggest and most successful companies in this world innovate at an unmatchable pace. Consider Google which develops more products in a year than many companies do in a lifetime. This pursuit of innovation speaks great volume about the work environment because innovation thrives where support is. More innovation means more ideas are implemented and assuming there is a unicorn somewhere, an innovating company is more likely to find it. However, unlike the philosophy that drove the industry a few decades ago, innovation is more and more driven by motivated intrapreneurs.

Companies like Microsoft and Google has promoted the entrepreneurial side of their talent pool of resources by allowing them to work on their ‘adventurous’ projects like an entrepreneur along with their work. This concept of intrapreneurship has fostered a more innovative work culture while cultivating a healthy competition among peers. Many such projects have been developed into bigger full-blown businesses for these companies yielding returns beyond imagination. One fine example is Orkut created by Orkut Büyükkökten for Google.

Intrapreneurship has its own set of challenges – bureaucracy in the top echelons of the company, inability to see the potential of the product and lack of recognition of the intrapreneurship. These challenges can plague growth of an intrepreneurial work culture. With the growing relevance of the operational paradigm for a sustainable growth, most of the companies are slowly changing the thought process of managers and employees by rewarding successes. More companies, both product and services, are inclined to support small personal projects in pursuit of one unicorn than ever in any time in history.

~S