Working in R&D I realized that effectively we are all intrapreneurs.   We’re constantly trying to develop new businesses for the corporation.

Intrapreneur is defined in the American Heritage Dictionary as:  

“A person within a large corporation who takes direct responsibility for turning an idea into a profitable finished product through assertive risk-taking and innovation”

One thing that entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs share is the goal of profitability.  We both are creating businesses, we are both looking for ways to create value and systematize the creation of that value.

The added complexity of contending with entrenched culture, entrenched bureaucracy and toxic organizations can make the intrepreneurs’ job more difficult.

On the other hand the added restraint of available funds make the entrepreneurs’ job more stressful and more risky.

One thing however that both the entrepreneur and intrapreneur must struggle with is …FAILURE.

The failure rate of my projects in R&D over the past 17 years is much greater than 50%.  Projects fail for a variety of reasons sometimes due to technical challenges, other times due to external market conditions, other times due to poor leadership or employee performance.

Entrepreneurs have the luxury of controlling their culture around the topic of failure because the entrepreneur can just adopt a positive attitude about failure, the entrepeneur usually works alone or with a very small team of like-minded leaders.

“I never fail, I just learn how things don’t work.” – unknown

In other words an entrepreneur can make up his/her own mind that failure is just part of the process, it is just a mechanism of learning.

The intrapreneur must contend with organizational health, a large team of people many more powerful and influential than himself, he must deal with culture, if the culture in ones R&D organization does not handle failure this can spell trouble for the intrapreneur.

Failed projects can result in finger-pointing, in blame politics, which can spell real career trouble.  One thing that R&D organizations should do is to constantly frame the story, the attitudes of everyone around failure. 

I have been part of organizations that lambasted the members of a failed project, the courageous leader was “torn to shreds”  so to speak, blamed for the wasting of millions and it was a career altering delay.

This is not healthy, R&D leaders can learn from the attitudes of entrepreneurs and lead accordingly.  Blame and perfection are culture destroyers in the innovation organization.

“The greatest barrier to success is the fear of failure.” ~ Sven Goram Erikson

A healthy perspective about failure is easiest way to rapidly improve R&D culture, at the highest levels corporations need to stop the blame game and permit failure, so we can relax and create system for capturing and spreading learnings and developing R&D professionals to develop business’ more effectively and more rapidly.

How does your organization handle failure?