Intrapreneurship Best Practices
For Intrapreneurs:
These are the steps you should follow to fully utilize 1Mby1M Premium Program.
1. Study the Customer Validation and Positioning modules in the curriculum.
2. Do you have a clear understanding of your value proposition?
3. Have you validated it with your target customers? You need to navigate your organization to find sales teams that cater to those customers, and speak with them, to get to the customers.
If you need help, please ask here. We can guide you on how to navigate your organization.
4. Positioning is key in identifying the target customer. Spend sufficient time with the Positioning module to ensure you have identified the right target customer base.
5. Validate. Validate. Validate. Immerse yourselves in the customer. Don’t just sit and prepare slideware based on assumptions. Talk to the field.
6. Whether your employer would be interested in your idea or not depends on how big an opportunity you are after. Do the Market Sizing module. A bottom-up TAM analysis is key.
7. Similarly, you need an ROI analysis. How much investment do you need? What ROI will you be delivering against that investment, in what timeframe?
8. Go through the Bootstrapping, Positioning, Customer Acquisition modules to understand the full process of entrepreneurship.
For you, very likely, the Angel/VC role will be played by your employer. Customer Acquisition will involve leveraging the existing channels of your employer, so you need to understand those.
9. Once you have all these pieces in order, you can request a presentation with your management.
10. While you are getting the pieces together, you should use the 1Mby1M private roundtables to get input. In some cases, we have closed roundtables for specific corporate partners as well. Ask Saikat (saikat@1mby1m.com).
11. Here are the presentation templates we recommend you work with: Customer Pitch and Investor Pitch
12. Being in 1Mby1M is, first and foremost, a learning opportunity. Your employer is essentially sponsoring you through an entrepreneurship business school program. Be sure not to waste the opportunity. Remember, many others wanted to be in this program, and by winning the slot, you have taken that opportunity away from others who wanted it. So, now that you are in the program, USE IT.
Timeline:
You have a 1-year membership to the program. Here’s how we recommend you use the time:
1. Within 3-months of joining, you should complete the curriculum
2. In parallel, you should identify an idea that you will be building upon.
3. By the 6-month marker, finish the customer validation and positioning work. Your Customer Pitch should be ready.
4. By the 9-month marker, you must have your TAM & ROI Analysis done, and the Investor Pitch ready.
5. Spend the last 3 months in the program pitching to management and selling your project. We can help you process and deal with feedback as you receive them.
6. If you can accelerate the schedule, and get your pitches ready sooner, you will be able to start pitching to your management and handle their objections, make progress with the project sooner as well.
We understand that you are doing all this on top of your day job, which is why, this timeline is a lot less intense than one that an entrepreneur would follow.
Internal Manager:
Your employer may have assigned an internal manager for you. Please be in regular communication with him/her. If you do not know who your internal manager is, ask Customer Support your questions.
Intellectual Property:
Your employer has investigated and agreed on IP issues with 1Mby1M. Please ask your manager for the IP policy.
Prototype:
Your employer wants to see a business case through your participation in 1Mby1M, first and foremost. The priority, therefore, is the business pitch (following the process above), NOT a prototype.
For Managers who work with Intrapreneurs inside the Corporation:
We’ve learned a lot from working with Corporate Partners on how to manage Intrapreneurship projects.
Here are some suggestions for best practices:
1. Study the 1Mby1M methodology so that we’re all on the same page and the mentoring is consistent.
2. Put the roundtables on your calendar, as well as on the calendars of the group you are managing. It is important to participate in the roundtables, and use them as check-in points both for managers and their groups.
3. Track how each person in your group is doing timeline-wise. Are they on track? Falling behind? What needs to be done to get them back on track?
4. Customer Support will communicate with you regularly to keep you posted on your group’s engagement levels. Work with him closely to identify issues, and address non-engagement problems quickly.
5. IP issues cause a lot of concerns. Pls ensure your group understand’s the IP policy wrt the program.
6. Many entrepreneurs get caught up in building prototypes. Pls ensure that they focus on validating and building the business case and investment thesis, before getting caught up in a prototype.
