The below was my response to a comment left on one of our slideshares from someone asking about what sort of people they should be looking when recruiting intrapreneurs into a corporate innovation process….I thought it might be interesting to re-post (the picture of a typical entrepreneur I added for colour…)

Key is to make the clear distinction between an intrapreneur and entrepreneur. Good intrapreneurs understand they aren’t trying to mimic the capabilities of individual start-ups (and they certainly don’t need to adopt the character traits of entrepreneurs.

Who would? The vast majority are egotistical, tunnel visioned, socio-paths!)

Instead, good intrepreneurs seek to create the innovation intensity that thousands of individual start-ups create when they dis-intermediate as a group.

The individuals you are looking for then are people who:

• understand how to manage risk
• take the long view
• are organised enough to be able to cope with 100s of experiments live at any point in time
• can build networks within the organisation to co-opt resource but who don’t want to be everyone’s friend
• and who, most importantly, haven’t got an ego, which allows them to understand they must keep their head down and build a mandate for innovation from demonstrable success (rather than shout every time an experiment goes live…)

As Ries says, successful start-ups don’t have superior ideas – they have superior process….

In short, if we understand corporate innovation is about building the capabilities that groups of start-ups exhibit, we begin to see what everyone believes are the weaknesses of people within corporates when it comes to innovation (careful, process driven and quiet) are in fact, precisely the skills we need for successful innovation…
Much of this thinking is in my forthcoming book – “The Value Hypothesis” – if you’d like to be added to the list of proof readers let me know….