Turkey’s next challenge: the development of the ‘intrapreneur’

“I believe that entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial leadership, in particular, are possibly more important within large businesses than they are within smaller companies,” he says. “In uncertain times like these, large organizations need to be as flexible as possible, ready to change and develop rapidly to accommodate the shifting needs of their customers and the market as a whole. But many only pay lip service to ‘intrapreneurship,’ the internal version of classic entrepreneurship, or even stifle it, because they fear losing control.”

Bülent Göğdün, a program director at the European School of Management and Technology (ESMT) in Berlin, points out that Turkey faces its own special challenges in trying to implement this type of thinking in the big corporate environment. “Turkey has a very long tradition of entrepreneurship, but it is still too limited to the creation of subsistence or lifestyle businesses,” he says. “What the country needs now is the creation of more general value -- the development and expansion of the kind of organizations that will provide more jobs, more exports, more foreign currency earnings.” According to Göğdün, the paternalistic nature of so many businesses here, whilst creating many benefits, can also smother the intrapreneurial spirit. “It’s not so much that coming up with your own ideas is frowned upon; it’s simply that it’s not encouraged. Consequently, too many employees have come to confuse initiative with disloyalty.”

Göğdün suggests that one solution could be to create two streams or silos within an organization, a more conservative one devoted to keeping the existing business on track and another less traditional and less controlled area where new ides could be fostered and experimented with. Innovations created within this second area would then be integrated into the mainstream once they had proved their commercial worth. “A classic example of this is when Lufthansa set up a low-cost airline which went against much of the accepted thinking in the parent company,” he says. “They let it run in its own way until it showed it was a genuinely viable entity, after which they brought it back under the main corporate umbrella.”

On an even more practical note, EM Lyon Professor Veronique Bouchard has researched the difficulties faced by potential intrapreneurs and come up with a 10-point list of the most common mistakes they should seek to avoid:

1. Thinking and acting like an independent entrepreneur

2. Counting on generous budgets, unlimited help and general goodwill

3. Relying on a single powerful sponsor

4. Taking too much notice (or no notice at all) of an immediate superior

5. Making a project visible too early

6. Concentrating on technical issues at the expense of the business plan

7. Ignoring similar or competing projects within the organization

8. Postponing “doing the numbers”

9. Failing to clarify expected rewards in case of success

10. Identifying too closely with a project

Whatever the difficulties of implementing it, particularly in the Turkish corporate community, intrapreneurship certainly looks a great idea. Many large organizations find that size can lead to stagnation as the creativity that brought success in the first place becomes stifled by bureaucracy, conformity and an unwillingness to take risks. And what better way to tackle this than to introduce some fresh entrepreneurial thinking to the existing mix? But wasn’t the global financial crisis actually caused by the actions of individuals with entrepreneurial tendencies within the banking system?