New Resources to Speed Employees Up the Intrapreneurial Learning Curve
By Beth Jenkins, Challenge Director, Business Fights Poverty At any given time, in any given company, there can be hundreds of employees with ideas for profitable new products, services, and business models that also create value for society. These would-be “intrapreneurs” come from all different backgrounds and roles, and many have never started a new […]
Supporting Entrepreneurs in the Pursuit of Peace
As a marketing executive, New York advertising executive Sabrina Prince has launched many brands. And after 15 years in the field she was looking to contribute her expertise to the global good. A Google search for “entrepreneur, peace, volunteer, women,” brought Sabrina to Bpeace, a nonprofit that matches business experts with entrepreneurs in challenged economies […]
Delivering on the Promise of Inclusive Business
Back in November 2008, on a hot, dusty day in Dar es Salaam, I vividly remember the moment I met Lillian Kessy. I was immediately struck by her confidence, dignity and determination. Only a year earlier, Lillian was in a desperate financial situation. By the time I met her, she was busy building a small […]
Effective Partnering: In Praise of Internal Politicians
The term ‘intrapreneur’ has emerged to describe people who stimulate innovation within their companies. A similar role describes the people who are able to navigate the various parts of their own organisations to enable them to engage in a partnership. Taking a cue from this recent HBR article, we can suggest the term ‘internal politician’ […]
Developing More Responsible Leaders
Dr. Karen Blakely,Head of the Centre for Responsible Management, Winchester University Emerging World’s mission is to ‘help business shape a better future’ and one of our main areas of interest is to understand the role of Responsible Leadership and how best to develop it. Over the last couple of years, we’ve been delighted to work […]
Lessons in Corporate Social Innovation
Interview withJustin DeKoszmovszky, Co-Founder and Chief Impact Officer, INBONIS Justin, first of all, please introduce yourself to the Business Fights Poverty community. I work at the intersection of strategy, sustainability and innovation. I started my career as a strategy consultant, and as time went by, I began looking for ways to apply those skills to […]
Supporting Corporate Social Innovation to Bring Mobile Services to Smallholder Farmers
Interview with Tegan Palmer, Business Intelligence Manager, mAgri program, GSMA. Q: Tegan, you are the Business Intelligence Manager at the mAgri program at GSMA. What does the mAgri program do? A: We catalyze scalable, commercial mobile services that improve the productivity and incomes of smallholder farmers and benefit the agriculture sector in emerging markets. We […]
Building Know-How for Corporate Social Innovation
There are growth opportunities outside its traditional markets. It needs to stay ahead of potentially disruptive technological changes. It has made high-profile commitments on complex sustainability issues. It wants to engage, retain, and develop future leaders by tapping into the power of purpose at work. For reasons like these, a growing number of companies are […]
Top 10 Discussions of 2016
2016 saw our 100th online discussion, with over 1,300 comments posted over the course of the year! Online discussions have played a central role in our new Challenges as a way for members to share insights on the Challenge question. From next year, we will be upgrading our discussion forum to make it easier to […]
The Perception of Corporate Volunteering
By Natasha Bridge, Management Consultant, Accenture and VSO Volunteer Results from a recent national online poll, commissioned by leading international development charity VSO, show that 56% of British full time workers would freely volunteer their skills to fight poverty in a developing country, if they had the support of their employer. The ‘Perception of Corporate […]
In Praise of Low Bono
I work for EY, running Enterprise Growth Services (EGS) – a programme which sends our consultants, both local and international, to help promising social impact enterprises grow. We help solar companies understand their customers better, WASH businesses build scalable franchises, and ag enterprises improve their cashflow. Our projects are full time, hands-on, mostly in sub-Saharan […]
The Most Valuable Organization: A Changemaker Company
In 2014, I argued that the social intrapreneur was a company’s most valuable employee. Social intrapreneurs embodied the spirit of “doing good, doing well” and demonstrated a unique ability to serve corporate bottom lines in a way that simultaneously produced positive impact for society. So how has the “most valuable employee” fared in 2015? It […]
A Conversation with Erik Simanis
Erik Simanis is Head of the Frontier Markets Initiative at Cornell University. His work is published in leading management journals, including the Harvard Business Review and The Wall Street Journal. He also writes for The Guardian’s sustainable business, and is a core faculty member of the Intrapreneurship Lab. His thinking is grounded in hands-on experience, […]
Launching the 2015 Intrapreneur Labs
So 2014 was a whirlwind of a year for The Intrapreneur Lab – the accelerator programme for social innovations inside large companies conceived by Leadership Laboratories, Accenture and Business Fight Poverty and now held in business schools across the world. At the bottom of this post are a few stats around the 4 Labs we’ve […]
Insights on Scaling Corporate Social Enterprise
On November 20 and 21 in Santiago, Chile, leaders and experts from the corporate, government, academic, consulting, civil society, and impact investing worlds came together for an engaging discussion on scaling corporate social enterprise. The Inter-American Development Bank believes such enterprises offer huge potential as sustainable drivers of development, growth, and job creation. But, like […]
How will you Step Forward in 2015?
Friday 5 December marks International Volunteer Day and to coincide with this, VSO is launching a new global campaign inviting people to pledge to #StepForward and raise the profile of volunteering for development in 2015. This campaign builds on recent research conducted by VSO and the Institute for Development Studies (IDS) demonstrating that ‘human-capital’ is […]
Scaling Corporate Social Enterprise in Latin America
Support for social entrepreneurship has grown rapidly in the last decade, and individuals seeking to launch new social enterprises now have a variety of options for networking, support for converting an idea into a tangible venture, and raising funds. But, despite these advances, social enterprises rarely have the opportunity to scale operations and, thus, impact. […]
Why is Intrapreneurship Worth the Effort?
The last in our series of short insights from The Intrapreneur Lab, is Damian Payiatakis, Director of Strategic Development at Barclays Wealth, Lab participant in the 2013 Lab and invited back as faculty 1 year later. We interviewed Damian back in October 2013. The Intrapreneur Lab: What challenges lie ahead for you and your project? […]
Why Intrapreneurship is Gaining Momentum
As part of the series of short insights from faculty members of the Intrapreneur Lab, we spoke last October to Adrian Ristow, Special Projects Director at Coca-Cola and lead on Project Last Mile. The Intrapreneur Lab: Why is intrapreneurship gaining momentum? Adrian: An intrapreneur is someone who is trying to drive some type of change […]
The Power of Intrapreneurship
As part of the series of short insights from faculty members of the Intrapreneur Lab, we spoke to Anuradha Bajaj, who at the time was acting head of the Private Sector Department at the Department for International Development and mentor at The Intrapreneur Lab. The Intrapreneur Lab: What’s your view of intrapreneurship? Anuradha: I think […]