Transcript

So intrapreneurship is a terminology that is kind of borrowed from the entrepreneurial environment, and the work that I’m doing is on entrepreneurial ecosystems, so how can, on a city level, on a regional level, on a national level, how can we foster entrepreneurial activities? And we can really talk about different factors and actors that have to come together in order to foster intrapreneurial activity amongst employees or amongst the next generation. Let me just touch upon a few of them. One is talent development. You need to develop the next generation of intrapreneurs early on, involving them early on, getting them going within the family firm, letting them take responsibility, letting them take ownership in the business, exposing them to what’s happening in the firm, asking for their opinion, letting them be critical about the status quo and come up with their own ideas about how things should ... View More go. That’s talent development. The second one is building a culture of creativity and innovation within the firm, so let them come up with new ideas, mentor them, guide them, be a sounding board for these ideas, within the context of the family firm, how it can relate to current activities and how it can bring the company forward. Third, building a marketplace for capital. First of all, if they come up with their own entrepreneurial ideas, they typically need some financial resources to get going. Provide that capital if needed, but at the same time, teach them financial literacy. Let them learn how to manage the money that they have, may it be through bootstrapping activities, that don’t just flood money into their pockets, let them be entrepreneurs as well and experience what it’s like to also run out of money from time to time, to really be conscious about money. So financial literacy, tremendously important. And fourth is about risk and failure, let them experience risk, let them learn how to manage risk and to learn where their own boundaries are and let them at least accept that failure happens. Expose them to failure, let them fail, let them learn from their failures and also let them observe your failures because everybody fails and by just exposing them to successes, they will not learn about what entrepreneurship is like and entrepreneurship is an up and down of failure and success.