Profitable growth and intrapreneurship

IE Focus | By Pablo Martin de Holan, Professor at IE Business School

Most firms either don´t see business opportunities, or see them and don´t act on them because they lack resources or don’t give their people the right incentives. Growing a business is a good way of achieving its strategic objectives and maintaining its competitive advantage. Growth can, however, be expensive and very uncertain. The dilemma facing the manager is straightforward: find new opportunities that are not too risky, and therefore not so interesting, or move away from the familiar area of competition with the investment and risk such a move involves. 

There is also a third alternative: growing on the back of opportunities created by intrapreneurship. This form of growth allows businesses to leverage opportunities that are usually missed. These opportunities can be many in number and range from minor innovations to radical market changes. Their common denominator is that they can appear anywhere in the business; one common situation in a company is that those who know how can´t, and those who can don´t know how. This short article will offer the basic ideas behind this method.