Why Enterprising Intrapreneurship?

School of Geography, University of Leeds

Intrapreneurship is the art of working within an organisation to effect change, by developing new ideas, procedures or products, by innovating practice and thereby enhancing the business. This requires skills.

This project is creating a suite of Context case materials that encourage participants to be

• creative, innovative, commercially aware, entrepreneurial and self-motivated within businesses and organisations.
• to build participant’s confidence in their skills to be enterprising in the first years at work.

The project is creating learning units that may be used by any staff and participants from school through FE and HE (UG to research level) and more widely in business and with the public. They are designed to encourage participants to be creative, to develop their innovation, negotiation, critical evaluation, self confidence and reflective skills through understanding how innovation is possible within businesses of all types. They give real insights into business problems that are topical and relevant.

The Enterprising Intrapreneurship cases are based on real work place issues in real companies. The web site also includes a 50 minute and 20 minute lecture to introduce ideas about intrapreneurship, a reading list to support further research, ice breaking and skills support information and suggested routes for use.

These Context cases aim is to develop participants’ awareness of intrapreneurship skills by researching recent, geographically relevant case examples and creating case studies around them that highlight skills as part of the process. While the initial audience is geography students nearly all the cases appeal to students in cognate disciplines and across faculties. It is our experience that these cases will give valuable transferable skills experience to students from all disciplines and that Careers Staff also find them valuable.

The project aims for 2003-5 are to:

• research further examples of intrapreneurship in business
• develop further case studies
• to integrate the cases with more challenging and relevant PDP practice by seeking collaboration / partnerships with various organisations to acquire their permission to draw on and adapt their Human Resources / CPD / PDP practices for use with taught undergraduate and postgraduate students generically, and to explicitly link these to the new skills and the intrapreneurship case materials.

Key skills that are incorporated in the cases include: team decision making and reporting, networking, creating presentations under pressure, coping with moving goalposts, understanding people.

One challenge we have is to find workplace partners.

• Are you / do you know employers with interesting stories we should contact?
• Have you got potential case materials?
• Do you have or know of businesses and organisations that have PDP/CPD material to share?

The project has been funded by the White Rose Centre for Enterprise, part of the White Rose University Consortium, and through the National Teaching Fellowship Award to Pauline Kneale. Thanks are due to both for their generosity and co-operation.