Advantages and disadvantages in Intrapreneurialship
During a Christmas vacation in the very early 1990’s I took it upon myself to put together a solution for my company that would cut the cost of an expensive effort by half. Two teams were assigned to work on a piece of a software product that ran on Windows and Macintosh personal computers and this solution would run on a more prevalent platform for authoring, but would make the appropriate conversion to the other when built. We could also target other systems and adapt the product as needed.
The solution became the team's defacto tool and soon earned a patent --and I a team to lead :)
Everything ran pretty smoothly for a year or two until a commercial product came into the market that solved a similar problem. It had good backing and soon became an industry standard in its area. This brought some unprecedented issues.
- Existing users resisted the in-house solution because the skills in using our product were not transferable.
- Maintaining the software was a challenge because it needed to keep up with changing export formats
- It was difficult for my team to start new projects. We spent much of our time doing technical support and fixing bugs. The dynamics of the team goals required us to follow only a minimal prescribed process, and the bug count increased with every fix.
- It is easier to find talent from a pool of professionals that have skills based on an industry standard, because there is a whole set of learning infrastructure. New hires using our tools had a steep learning curve and support requirements on our part
So, a good manager should embrace a winning intrapreneurial solution only if that solution doesn’t already exist in a wider scope like open source. Depending on the circumstances, adopting a good idea can provide significant benefits, including a successful existing or new business! In our case, our in-house solution solved immediate problems, provided some worthy challenges, increased the team visibility and saved a great deal of resources. But when the time was right we chose to embrace the external solution, effectively producing a win-win situation at different timeframes.
Keep your mind open for internal ideas, but don't ride everything on it. Always question your status quo. This is a good checkpoint to include in your management agenda.
See other blogs by me at: http://puritysoft.blogspot.com
The solution became the team's defacto tool and soon earned a patent --and I a team to lead :)
Everything ran pretty smoothly for a year or two until a commercial product came into the market that solved a similar problem. It had good backing and soon became an industry standard in its area. This brought some unprecedented issues.
- Existing users resisted the in-house solution because the skills in using our product were not transferable.
- Maintaining the software was a challenge because it needed to keep up with changing export formats
- It was difficult for my team to start new projects. We spent much of our time doing technical support and fixing bugs. The dynamics of the team goals required us to follow only a minimal prescribed process, and the bug count increased with every fix.
- It is easier to find talent from a pool of professionals that have skills based on an industry standard, because there is a whole set of learning infrastructure. New hires using our tools had a steep learning curve and support requirements on our part
So, a good manager should embrace a winning intrapreneurial solution only if that solution doesn’t already exist in a wider scope like open source. Depending on the circumstances, adopting a good idea can provide significant benefits, including a successful existing or new business! In our case, our in-house solution solved immediate problems, provided some worthy challenges, increased the team visibility and saved a great deal of resources. But when the time was right we chose to embrace the external solution, effectively producing a win-win situation at different timeframes.
Keep your mind open for internal ideas, but don't ride everything on it. Always question your status quo. This is a good checkpoint to include in your management agenda.
See other blogs by me at: http://puritysoft.blogspot.com
posted by teambuilder at 1:18 AM
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