Intrapreneurship: The Turtle wins the Marathon

In a recent post on LinkedIn, I raised the question: Innovation Thought Leaders, where are you?

Backed by Google Trends data, I showed how Lean Startup thought leaders like Steve Blank, Eric Ries, and Alex Osterwalder are losing traction.

David J Bland, a well-respected voice in Corporate Innovation, added the following comment:

I don’t want to speak for them but many of us saw the hype cycle coming. Lots of buzz early on and then people realized it was hard work. I’m still pushing it forward 😁

This comment made me think and take a closer look at the data. Is Lean Startup only hype? And how about Intrapreneurship, another Corporate Innovation topic close to my heart?

Here is what I found:

While Lean Startup (“the Rabbit”) is slowly losing traction after a fast rise and peak in 2014, Intrapreneurship (“the Turtle”) is steadily rising and showing a promising forecast.

I believe that while Lean Startup truly started a revolution towards faster iterations, lean thinking, and fail-forward experimenting, it failed to manifest as an overall framework for (Corporate) Innovation and diffused into other, more holistic approaches.

Intrapreneurship, on the other side, is not at all new or hype and is a term going all the way back to 1985, when Gifford Pinchot III defined it as follows:

dreamers who do. Those who take responsibility for creating an innovation of any kind within an organization.

It’s a topic that evolved a lot over the last decades and got tailwind by recent trends toward flatter hierarchies, more purpose in (work-)life, agile practices, and the increasing war for talent.

All familiar with the story about the Rabbit and the Turtle know what is now to come: The slowly and steadily evolving outruns the fast-paced sprinter.

You can find the original story about the Rabbit and the Turtle here.