In every organization, thousands of new business ideas are waiting to be unlocked.

If well supported, these could lead to major improvements of existing products or services and business models, or to launching new ones altogether.

Yet most employees get those ideas whilst doing their jobs, and may think it's not their responsibility to act. They often don't even know what to do with the idea- and this is a significant loss to the company.

There are, however, different ways to capture those ideas bubbling up and, more importantly, to support those employees to take ownership and test their ideas for real- learning valuable skills and changing ways of working in the process.

That's why companies like like Nestlé, Swisscom, Bayer, IKEA, Siemens and SAP run intrapreneurship programs.  Below you’ll find a glimpse of how they are running their programs and the outcomes they have achieved so far, as shared during recent Innov8rs Connect online events.

InGenius At Nestlé: Empowering Employees To Unleash Creativity

How does a 150-year-old company – that also happens to be the largest food and beverage corporation and overall 22nd-largest company in the world – continue to innovate? By leveraging the collective power of its more than 352,000 employees through a program called InGenius, co-founded by product group manager Nick De Blasio.

The idea behind InGenius is that innovation can come from anywhere and is in everyone's best interest. This employee-driven innovation program fosters employees to unleash their creativity and supports the ideas they share. A supportive digital platform enables Nestlé to design solutions around the ideas and insights coming directly from the people with their ears on the ground, and working most closely on the resulting solutions.

Through InGenius, they narrowed down 7,000+ ideas to 180 prototypes, which have ended up in 84 MVP pilots to date. The projects coming out of that process have ranged from an ocean container tracker to automatically anticipate supply chain delays, to customer speech analytics designed to improve marketing and customer support.

In the COVID-19 pandemic, a Hack COVID19 challenge generated 96 ideas to enhance virtual collaboration, improve exercise for sedentary work-from-home employees, and more.

Kickbox At Swisscom: Making Innovation Tangible For Everyone

With more than 19,000 employees in Switzerland and Italy, Swisscom is a major force in central Europe. And they wanted to involve its employees for innovation, feeling the pulse of both the current and future generations. For that purpose, firmly believing people who care can create incredible things if they have the space to do so, they launched Kickbox, an intrapreneurship program building on Adobe’s original Kickbox program.

It's a system designed to create new business for the company while playfully educating employees at the same time. Moreover, they aimed to attract and retain talents due to the trust and support given in that bottom-up innovation program.

On the surface, the process employed by Kickbox may not be revolutionary. But a closer look reveals just how Swisscom applied generally known innovation concepts in a unique and productive way:

· Everything starts with the idea submission done through an easy-to-use online platform. Every employee can submit an idea, 24 hours a day.
· These raw ideas are not judged in the first place but are moved into the validation phase. It’s where idea owners prove the value and business case of their idea. Yet the difference here is that, unlike most innovation programs, most ideas actually get validated. The validation process became automated, with scalable resources to help every employee succeed.
· Validated ideas then get piloted. Teams find a sponsor, get a budget, and develop an MVP.
· Finally, the best ideas become GoldBoxes. They get implemented, and become a part of Swisscom.

It might not be intuitive, but the validation phase becomes the most important part of the process, emphasized Ralph Hartmeier. The ability to say “yes”, and reward even ideas that don't become GoldBoxes, has played a major role in shifting the culture towards embracing innovation, with every employee feeling they can contribute.

Innovation Agenda At Bayer: Mobilizing An Employee Entrepreneurship Movement

How do you expand a company culture that is focused on efficiency and control, and where innovation is traditionally relegated as an R&D topic? At Bayer, the answer was introducing the idea that everyone can contribute, explained Henning Trill, former VP of Innovation Strategy.

To get there, Bayer focused on the three dimensions: outcomes, behaviors, and enablers or blockers. The first step was to identify ideal outcomes for the impending cultural shift. Together with the HR team, they then defined desired behaviors to enable that outcome. The final step was to identify what was blocking the cultural shifts towards innovation. Think of slow decision-making, risk avoidance, a short-term focus, a silo mentality, a lack of digital and innovation skills, and a heavily regulated environment.

To move beyond these obstacles, Bayer built an internal innovation ecosystem. The employee is at the center, with every effort and initiative designed to help them express their ideas.

Three levers can help to accomplish that:

· An internal resource and crowdsourcing platform that includes background information and the opportunity for any one of its 40,000 visitors to submit ideas, collaborate with colleagues across the globe, and more.
· An innovation network of more than 1,000 employees and leaders to promote the platform inside the company, provide mentorship and coaching, and support the innovation effort in every way possible.
· An entrepreneurship program with about 500 employees to apply the Lean Startup methodology to ideas relevant within the scope of Bayer.

Bayer learned that it is key for innovation/business leaders and HR to work together when driving a transformation. Additionally, they found that having local leaders in the driver's seat you’ll see results across your subcultures much faster.

Co-Creation At IKEA: Creating A Better Everyday Life

The COVID-19 pandemic has been a challenge across industries, but large-box retailers have especially felt its impact. For Cindy Soo, leading the Innovation & Co-Creation teams for 25 countries and regions globally at IKEA, the solution was to bring all employees - from the retail floor to the Service and Global Head office - into the ideation and innovation process.

The challenging part was in rallying employees into this new way of thinking. They are busy working diligently on day-to-day tasks and may not always see the value of thinking beyond the short-term. So, IKEA realized that innovation required not only a new process or new tools, but a shift in mindset.

Making that shift, of course, is not possible overnight. Instead, IKEA is continuously rolling out activities and communication programs, nudging employees to turn a set of mindset shift tasks into behaviors, and behaviors into habits.

Just how this shift is rolled out also matters. Rather than building complex activities or using complex language based on design thinking, which employees are not familiar with, IKEA kept it simple. The goal: to understand consumer needs, pain points, and aspirations. Tools such as "Stinky Fish" and “IDoARRT" allow everyone to work together - at the same level and in a safe environment - across every level of the organization.

If that feels obvious, that's exactly the point. The simple nature of the process allows everyone to come to the table, reducing artificial barriers that can so often be created through complex processes, terminology, and hierarchy.

Intrapreneurs Bootcamp At Siemens: Creating A Crowd Of Resilient, Self-Driven Intrapreneurs

Founded in Berlin in 1847, Siemens today operates in more than 200 countries and employs over 300,000 people. But how do you foster an experimental mindset and get the most from the employees’ power, energy, and capability to innovate within such a big organization? To Siemens, the answers seemed obvious: breaking down the silos and bringing together people from all the areas in a “safe space” where they are enabled to evolve, grow, and create a great innovation impact for the company and thus for customers.

With that in mind, in 2016, Siemens founded the Intrapreneurs Bootcamp program, a safe space where employees can develop their innovative ideas along a well-balanced and time-boxed journey, making use of the many corporate assets.

Through the Intrapreneurs Bootcamp, the company aims to transform employees into intrapreneurs and generate business ideas, thus creating a culture of innovativeness, intrapreneurship, growth mindset, empowerment.

In a nutshell, as program co-founder Christoph Krois puts it, the Intrapreneurs Bootcamp empowers people to connect with their own genius, passion, and competencies and drive breakthrough innovation for Siemens in an agile and customer-centric way. It helps tap into a pool of possibilities and realize them.

Mainly due to the Covid-19 circumstances, the latest Bootcamp was held completely virtually, always with the same goal: creating promising business ideas and a crowd of resilient, self-driven intrapreneurs. And it was a success. Indeed, a survey of participants revealed that 95% increased focus on innovation to create corporate and social impact, 84% increased resilience/capacity to overcome failure, and 96% increased sense of loyalty toward the company.

SAP.iO Intrapreneurship At SAP: Helping Employees Startup And Scale

SAP is the largest European B2B software provider. They currently employ around 100,000 people, and about 70% of all processes globally touch an SAP system. They firmly believe that an organization per se has never created innovation: innovation is always a matter of people and their ideas and ability to innovate. For this reason, in 2017, SAP has established SAP.iO, an intrapreneurship program.

SAP.iO empowers the most ambitious employees with an entrepreneurial mindset to launch new ventures and build the future of enterprise software for SAP. All employees can embark on a journey to “learn entrepreneurship”, but only top teams gain access to an exclusive network of advisors, hands-on education, and accelerator programs to build their own business from idea to investment.

The intrapreneurship process has four steps:

· Scouting: the aim is to attract talent and search for internal innovators who can power up new ventures to futureproof SAP.
· Upskilling: the identified innovators may not have all the needed skills to launch a product. Accordingly, SAP provides entrepreneurial education to accelerate innovators’ learnings. Indeed, one of the main goals of SAP is even enabling employees to develop an entrepreneurial mindset they can then take back into their day-to-day jobs.
· Screening: meaningful opportunity areas and screen teams along the investment funnel are identified and helped grow through an accelerator program.
· Partnering: SAP ultimately creates a valuable ecosystem of venture partners, startup advisors, and mentors to provide input into these products as they mature.

Since 2017, bringing together leaders from different regions, industries, and business lines to transform how businesses run, SAP.iO has helped over 375 internal ventures accelerate their growth while enabling thousands of SAP customers to access innovation, as Alexa Gorman, SVP, Global Head of SAP.iO Foundries & Intrapreneurship at SAP explained.