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.
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.
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?
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:
Introducing the Playbook was Emil Lamprecht from Growth Mechanics, one of the key drivers of the research project.
We caught up with the CBO and Co-Founder of Arbusta, Juan Umaran about fighting the ‘war on talent’ in Latin America with opportunity youth. Arbusta is the latest investment of the Yunus Social Business fund in Colombia.
IKEA Foundation and Yunus Social Business (YSB) announced the launch of their Enterprise Support Landscape Study series, a collaborative research project into the social-business landscapes in India, Kenya, Colombia and Brazil.
These have been difficult times for our portfolio companies. They are working hard to protect those they employ and serve. In India, Waste Ventures recycle plastic and improve the lives of waste pickers. As they are dependent on revenues from previous months to meet their expenses, the abrupt pause to their activities has made their ability to pay their workforce much more difficult.
What are Social Intrapreneur programs, and how do organisations build them? Is there a route to a post-COVID future where corporations are accelerating social innovation by empowering their own employees?
In this guest post, Ritu Soni Srivastava (https://ritu.io/mentorship-basics/) talks about her involvement as mentor of the MAN Impact Accelerator (our corporate innovation accelerator program) and the 3 things she would encourage every mentorship program to adopt.
The ancient Greek philosopher Diogenes once famously noted that: “we have two ears and one tongue so that we would listen more and talk less“. The act of listening as a means of truly understanding an entrepreneur is an important skill when it comes to tackling the challenges they face.