The Man Who Named the Intrapreneur Just Confirmed What Nearly Broke Me

Why the hardest lesson I learned building innovation at a pharma company turns out to be the one the field’s founder considers central — and what most companies still get backwards.

In 1978, Gifford Pinchot III coined a word for the thing I would spend a decade of my career doing before I had a name for it: intrapreneur. The entrepreneur inside the organization. The person who builds something new using the company’s resources, on the company’s clock, usually without being asked and often against the company’s own reflexes.

Years later, Gifford and I would work together to build a School for Intrapreneurs — a program to find the people in a large pharmaceutical company who had that entrepreneurial spark and give them a way to use it. So when I read the chapter he wrote with Mariusz Soltanifar, Digital Intrapreneurship: The Corporate Solution to a Rapid Digitalisation, I wasn’t reading it as a neutral observer. I was reading it as someone checking a map against terrain I’d walked.

The map holds. And the thing it gets most right is the thing that took me longest — and cost me most — to learn.

The lesson everyone gets backwards

Ask a room of executives how their company decides which innovations to fund, and you’ll hear some version of: we evaluate the ideas. There’s a process. A committee. A scoring rubric. Proposals go in, the best ones come out.

Pinchot and Soltanifar say this plainly: that’s not how good innovation actually gets selected, and the committee model reliably produces the wrong result. Committees reject genuinely disruptive ideas because they’re hard to understand, and they wave through mediocre, familiar-looking ones. What actually works isn’t a process at all. It’s a web of trusting relationships between intrapreneurs and sponsors — managers with enough clout to protect them, who know the person and the idea well enough to make a better bet than any rubric could.

I learned this the hard way, in reverse. Every initiative I got off the ground at Boehringer Ingelheim that survived had a sponsor behind it — usually more than one, at different levels. Every one that died, died because I’d been focused on making the idea bulletproof when I should have been building the relationship that would protect it. The idea was never the bottleneck. It took me years to believe that sentence, and the chapter states it as settled fact.

The venture-capital logic Pinchot has used for decades captures it: better a class-A intrapreneur with a class-B idea than the reverse. Companies increase their return on innovation not by picking the right plan, but by picking the right person to trust. I have watched exactly this play out — watched a brilliant idea die because the person carrying it couldn’t be trusted to push it through resistance, and watched a modest idea become something real because the person behind it was relentless and honest and had two managers willing to spend political capital on them.

The part that isn’t in the chapter — because it can’t be

Here’s where I’ll extend the map rather than just confirm it.

The chapter describes sponsorship as an organizational design problem: train managers to sponsor, build it into their KPIs, delegate discretionary budget so many managers can protect many intrapreneurs. All correct. All necessary. And all written from the altitude of a model.

What the model can’t quite convey is what sponsorship costs the sponsor, and therefore what you’re really asking for when you go looking for one. A real sponsor spends capital they can’t get back. They vouch for you in rooms you’re not in. When your project stumbles — and it will — they absorb some of that in front of their own peers. The chapter notes, almost in passing, one of the truest things I know about this work: the way to identify a real sponsor is to ask a successful intrapreneur, “In your darkest hour, who supported you?” The honesty of that question is the whole thing. Sponsorship isn’t measured on the day of the launch, when everyone wants a photo. It’s measured in the dark hour, when the person could quietly withdraw and let you take the fall — and doesn’t.

And then the chapter offers a piece of advice I wish I’d understood a decade earlier: once you’ve found the great sponsors, don’t celebrate them publicly. Great sponsors give credit away; praising them by name annoys everyone they’ve quietly credited, breeds jealousy, and blunts their effectiveness. Value them privately. Keep, as the authors put it, a secret list — and promote them when you can. I spent years wanting to shine a light on the people who protected me, thinking gratitude meant visibility. It doesn’t. The best thing you can do for a great sponsor is help them rise quietly, so they can protect the next person the way they protected you.

Why this matters more now, not less

The reason Pinchot and Soltanifar frame all this around digital intrapreneurship is worth sitting with. Their argument is that digitalization has created more high-return intrapreneurial opportunities than at any point since the industrial era — and that most companies are squandering them. Not for lack of digital talent; they hire plenty. They squander them because their management can’t create the conditions in which digitally fluent people are safe to act. The talent is already inside. The immune system rejects it anyway.

That’s the connection to everything I write about here. The barriers aren’t technological. They’re organizational — and they’re the same barriers, whether the innovation is a Business Resource Group, a remote-work pilot, or an AI model that reroutes a rail network. The founder of the field and I built a School for Intrapreneurs on that premise years ago. Reading his latest work, I’m struck less by how much has changed than by how little the fundamentals have. Ideas were never the shortage. Pathways were. Sponsors are how you build them.

Gifford Pinchot III and Mariusz Soltanifar’s chapter is open access under a Creative Commons license and is part of Digital Entrepreneurship: Impact on Business and Society (Springer, 2021). Worth your time if you’re serious about this work.

I write more about building innovation that lasts inside large organizations in my forthcoming book, The OrgChanger. → Sign up to read the first chapter for free and get notified when ‘The OrgChanger’ book becomes available! - No Spam. Opt out at any time.