Program Managers From SAP, Airbus and Kohler Co. Share Their Experiences As Social Intrapreneurs
Program Managers From SAP, Airbus and Kohler Co. Share Their Experiences As Social Intrapreneurs
For 14 months, we’ve been working closely with remarkable employees at some of the best known corporations in the world. We wanted to understand how they are driving corporate innovation from within and making their companies a force for good. On Tuesday, we spoke live to some of these intrepid Social Intrapreneurs, and shared the findings from our extensive joint research. Here’s what we learned.
WHAT IS A SOCIAL INTRAPRENEUR?
You might have heard words like ‘intrapreneur’ or ‘social enterprise,’ but what is a Social Intrapreneur and what do they do? Here’s the definition we go by:
“/ˈsəʊ.ʃəl ɪntrəprəˈnɜːʃɪp/: A Social Intrapreneur is an entrepreneurial employee who develops a profitable new product, service, or business model that creates value for society and her company.
This can include working with social entrepreneurs to lean on and/or scale their model through the company’s value chain.
Social intrapreneurs help their employers meet sustainability commitments and create value for customers and communities in ways that are built to last.”
In other words, a Social Intrapreneur seeks to create social innovation from within their company. They solve human problems while continuing to make profits for their business. This has the benefit of allowing the Social Intrapreneur to rally the know-how and expertise of the corporation behind a social end.
OUR RESEARCH: A PLAYBOOK FOR SOCIAL INTRAPRENEURS
How can companies support Social Intrapreneurs? How can they build structures to fast-track social innovation to scale? And of course, how can employees themselves succeed as Social Intrapreneurs? In cooperation with Growth Mechanics, INSEAD, HEC Paris and the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship, these are the questions that we sought to address in our research, with some fascinating results. Want to find out more?
INSIGHTS FROM SAP, AIRBUS AND KOHLER CO
We had the pleasure of hosting a panel at the Global Intrapreneurship Week with employees from corporations doing some very exciting work as Social Intrapreneurs. Yunus Social Business Co-founder and CEO Saskia Bruysten spoke with:
- Rey Buckman, Airbus BizLab (#Africa4Future)
- Deborah Kaplan, SAP 1 Billion Lives
- Angie Peltzer, Kohler Co
Introducing the Playbook was Emil Lamprecht from Growth Mechanics, one of the key drivers of the research project.
We took a holistic, expedient and humane approach to support smallholder farmers in Colombia
On 20 March this year, Luis Miguel Botero discovered that his social business, Pomario, faced an existential threat. It was the day that a nation-wide quarantine in Colombia was announced, which was ultimately extended until the end of August. For Botero, as for many business owners, this presented the threat that his social businesses’ revenues would disappear overnight.
Investment Readiness Programme in Colombia with The Boston Consulting Group
Since 2016, our team in Colombia has been running an accelerator programme in collaboration with The Boston Consulting Group (BCG). The goal of the programme is to build the ecosystem around social business in Colombia and help those with a high potential to become ‘investment ready’.
How grant funding came in at exactly the right time for waste pickers in São Paulo.
Alexandre Furlan, CEO of Instituto Muda, has been building his business since he finished college 12 years ago. São Paulo generates 20,000 tons of waste on a daily basis. Yet only 5% of the residential buildings have public recycling collection service - the majority of it goes to landfill. Instituto Muda tackles the problem by picking and sorting recycled waste and donating it to waste
