The Changing Nature of Work: 30 signals to consider for a sustainable future

SIGNAL 28. Intrapreneurship

In the era of rapid change, many organizations are losing out because they are not willing to embrace innovation and to change or pivot their usual ways of work, their services and products. In addition to losing customers, they are losing their top talent, since young people are the ones who often leave and create their own start-ups.

Large traditional organizations can transform and keep up with progress to stay competitive by launching internal entrepreneurship initiatives (‘intrapreneurship’). They can change their organizational design and business models to accommodate these initiatives. This can be achieved by creating separate units such as incubators, accelerators and innovation labs. They can organize hackathons and challenge prizes that provide different types of entrepreneurship support. Some corporate organizations have established their own venture funds for supporting corporate ventures.

Organizations need a strategic plan for professionalizing and institutionalizing innovation. They need to create innovation careers rather than innovation jobs. An organization’s structural drivers of internal innovation are innovation resources (e.g. money and employee time) and rewards that encourage entrepreneurial behavior, allowing risk-taking and organizational freedom. The innovation culture within an organization can be shaped by promoting values of innovative thinking, autonomy, proactivity, market awareness and risk-taking.

Check out the next signal, #29: State-driven entrepreneurship.

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The Changing Nature of Work: 30 signals to consider for a sustainable future

Work helps sustain livelihoods and largely determines the quality of life. Its changing nature is at the frontier of development. This report is the result of a broad horizon scanning by six UNDP Accelerator Labs across Europe and the Commonwealth of Independent States.  They reveal 30 signals that shape the “where, who, how, and why” of the changing nature of work. From the impact of COVID-19 on the workforce to new work models and entrepreneurial ecosystems, the authors explore opportunities and threats, as well as solutions from local contexts that can be scaled up into positive answers to the challenges people around the world are facing.  Download the full report here.