A critical mass of connectors, salespeople and mavens
are finding each other and helping social intrapreneurship reach a tipping point
More than 30 years ago, as a young and inexperienced social entrepreneur (not that I knew or used such a term then), I was just trying to do something practical to improve economic and social conditions in the north-east of England where I was based. Initially, for myself and fellow social entrepreneurs it felt very lonely. Before long however, we started to connect with kindred spirits around the country. We came from different political backgrounds, different ages and different sectors.
We formed the Education for Enterprise Network, a loose unincorporated grouping. What brought us together was a common passion to make a positive difference by encouraging and helping young people to make their own jobs. There were no grand plans or strategies beyond a commonly held vision that in 1980s Britain, facing drastic economic and political and social shifts, we wanted to promote youth enterprise. We occasionally organised common projects but mostly it was one of us taking a lead and others supporting as they felt appropriate.
This bottom-up approach produced a network of Youth Enterprise Centres, built the Shell Livewire youth enterprise programme, and provided early underpinning for the Prince's Youth Business Trust. It primarily relied on mutual knowledge, respect and trust, rather than on contracts or codes of conduct.
Why this nostalgic trip down memory lane? Several meetings and conversations in recent weeks about social intrapreneurism remind me of those exciting new frontier days with the Youth Enterprise Network. This time though, the loose, nascent network encouraging social intrapreneurs is global and virtual as well as local and face-to-face.
Social intrapreneurs are people within a large corporation who take direct initiative for innovations that address social or environmental challenges while also creating commercial value for the company. Social intrapreneurs are typically going against the grain, challenging their organisation and questioning the status quo to develop and implement commercially attractive sustainability solutions.
I am a great fan of Malcolm Gladwell's 'tipping point' theory of how ideas and fashions take hold. Gladwell argues that small tipping points occur thanks to connectors, salespeople and mavens. Connectors are naturally well-networked people and 'mavens', a Yiddish word, are people who can glean meaning from a lot of disparate information.
A critical mass of connectors, salespeople and mavens are slowly finding each other not only physically but also through social media. Among these are Maggie De Pree and Alexa Clay of The Human Agency, social intrapreneur Gib Bulloch and his colleagues in Accenture Development Partnerships and the team at Ashoka Changemakers who combined to create the League of Intrapreneurs. Initially it was a global competition and now it is an on-going focal point for social intrapreneurship.
Together, they have attracted an eclectic group of companies, social intrapreneurs, social change platforms like the Impact Hubs, and entrepreneurial academic centres. They've also attracted entrepreneurial public servants in national and international development agencies who recognise the potential of social intrapreneurism as a way of involving companies in inclusive and sustainable development – a growing challenge with the putative Sustainable Development Goals after 2015.
The business-led corporate responsibility coalition, CSR Europe has teamed up with the BMW Foundation and Ashoka to help promote social intrapreneurship to and via their corporate members and national coalition partners across the EU.
One result of this organic coming together is that educational programmes for social intrapreneurism are starting to grow. To the well-established Aspen Institute First Movers Fellowship Program for social entrepreneurs who are already relatively senior figures in their companies, we can now add an online module for students and younger employees just thinking about social intrapreneurism, Tech Change TC108 – Social Intrapreneurship – Innovation Within Institutions, peer-support networks in several Impact Hubs such as São Paulo and The Intrapreneur Lab. The latter is an intense three-day course followed by three months of coaching for participants.
Barclays, one of the first businesses to partner with The Intrapreneur Lab, ran an internal competition to find their would-be social intrapreneurs to participate. Once they have successfully completed the Lab, they will be able to bid for the Barclays Social Innovation Facility. This is a potential positive double whammy: tapping the competitive spirit of talented employees and creating an aspirational Lab alumni club with employees from other leading companies which are participating.
In a new book I co-authored with Melody McLaren and Heiko Spitzeck, Social Intrapreneurism and All That Jazz, we use the metaphor of jazz music to help tell the story of pioneering social intrapreneurs around the world, what makes them tick, and some of the things they have found helpful. We also explore what companies can do to encourage potential social intrapreneurs.
Trying to be a social intrapreneur is not easy or for the faint hearted, and it's certainly not some magic bullet for employee engagement or commercial innovation. However, with the emerging network of connectors, salespeople and mavens, social intrapreneurism can become another practical route for corporate sustainability (in both senses) and for sustainable development.
David Grayson is director of the Doughty Centre for Corporate Responsibility, Cranfield School of Management.
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