West Words

One definition says that intrapreneurship is “the introduction and implementation of a significant innovation for the firm by one or more employees working within an established organisation”. It is the blossoming of the entrepreneurial spirit inside a large organisation. An intrapreneur is an intra-corporate entrepreneur, one who works as an employee of a corporation. Intrapreneurship offers large organisations the hope that they can remain entrepreneurial long after they have ceased to be run by entrepreneurs.

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Lean production is the name given to a group of highly efficient manufacturing techniques developed (mainly by large Japanese companies) in the 1980s and early 1990s. Lean production was seen as the third step in an historical progression, which took industry from the age of the craftsman through the methods of mass production and into an era that combined the best of both. It has been described as “the most fundamental change to occur since mass production was brought to full development by Henry Ford early in the 20th century”.

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The growth share matrix is a framework developed by the Boston Consulting Group (bcg) in the 1960s to help companies think about the priority (and resources) that they should give to the different businesses in their portfolio. Commonly known as the Bostonmatrix, it puts these businesses individually into one of four categories, each with a memorable name.

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The idea of the organisation as a living, learning entity was developed by Chris Argyris and Donald Schon in their  1978 book Organizational Learning. Learning by the people within an organisation becomes learning by the organisation itself. Changes in people’s attitudes are reflected in changes in the formal and informal rules that govern the organisation’s behaviour.

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Globalisation is the attempt by companies to sell the same product or service simultaneously in many different markets around the world. The spread of globalisation over the past few decades has been so wide that nobody is surprised to see Coca-Cola in rural Vietnam, Shell petrol stations in eastern Turkey or Nike shoes in Nigeria. Markets and tastes everywhere have converged at a rapid rate.

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The glass ceiling is an invisible, artificial barrier that prevents qualified individuals (particularly women) from advancing beyond a certain point within their employing organisation. The barrier’s existence can be deduced from the fact that there is a stark difference between the proportion of women (and of minority groups) who graduate from the leading universities and business schools, and the proportion who reach the higher echelons of corporate management. 

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Innovation is “a creative idea that has been made to work”, writes David Hussey in The Innovation Challenge. “It can be as basic as a procedural change in a distribution system or as complex as entry into a whole new market.” Everybody knows an innovative company when they see one.

In lists of such companies the same names come up again and again – 3m, Hewlett-Packard, General Electric, Sony – companies where continual innovation has produced far higher returns than ordinary business investment. 3m’s progressive policy on innovation used to commit it to earning  30% of its revenue from products that had been brought to market within the previous four years. 

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