Intrapreneurship is responsible for a lot of product innovation around the world today. At Lockheed Martin, intrapreneurs developed a number of famous aircraft designs and at 3M, they came up with Post-It Notes and at Google, they came up with Google News, AdSense and Gmail. What these examples have in common is that companies embraced the idea of allowing their employees to become entrepreneurs and capitalize on new business ideas. These free flowing ideas come from in-house programs, which include Google’s famous “20% program”, contests, hackathons, skunk works and informal programs where employees pitch ideas directly to executives. Smart companies want you to become an intrapreneur because it fuels business growth and allows them to gain a competitive advantage in their industry.

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