Intrapreneurship Conference interviews ORCHANGO president

The Intrapreneurship Conference interviewed ORCHANGO founding president Edmond Mellina and the other speakers for their upcoming event in Montreal on June 16.

An overview of Edmond’s presentation can be found here. Friends of ORCHANGO can use the special 25% discount provided by the conference organizers.

Why is it the right time for any organization in any industry to start implementing Intrapreneurship?

Industries like print media, music, lodging and car travel have already felt the full brunt of digital disruption. With Google, iTune, Airbnb or Uber, these sectors have experienced massive disruption to long standing business models. Most incumbent players didn’t see it coming. They lost a lot. Some are gone.

However, most industries are still in the early stages of digital disruption. The traditional players still have an opportunity to adapt to the new world and come out of the process in a strong position. Innovation is obviously the key to success here – digital innovation of course, but other types of innovations too. Intrapreneurship is a mean to that end.

As for the print media, music, lodging and car travel sectors, well, more disruption is coming. The disrupters will eventually be disrupted. So all the players need to embrace intrapreneurship!

In your experience, what is the crucial enabler for intrapreneurship to deliver results?

Having an idea is just the first step of the innovation process. We cannot turn ideas – whether products, user experiences, strategic initiatives or complex ecosystems – into realities without acceptance by stakeholders. Therefore, I see corporate innovators’s ability to think and act like change leaders as the crucial enabler.

Intrapreneurs with an uncanny knack for generating buy-in across a wide spectrum of stakeholders get support for their project. They overcome the dreaded corporate inertia. They are able to operationalize their idea or bring it to market. Only then does invention become innovation; and intrapreneurship deliver results.

What are you going to share on stage on June 16th?

I will share “battle-tested”  tools, mindsets and techniques that I see as absolutely essential for intrapreneurs to think and act like change leaders. I originally developed these tools / techniques – and adopted the mindsets – through extensive trial and errors, while driving major change and innovation inside organizations.

I strongly believe they should be in the toolkit of any intrapreneur working on making change and innovation stick.

Participants will start applying the tools right during the session. I will encourage them to continue testing the tools post-conference with their current innovation project. If the tools, mindsets and techniques work for them – which I am confident they will – participants will have strengthen their intrapreneurship toolkit in a big way!