This month’s article focuses on another breed of entrepreneur known as intrapreneur. An intrapreneur is a person within a large corporation who takes direct responsibility for turning an idea into a profitable finished product or service through proactive risk-taking and innovation.

In this article, I provide the insights and wisdom from Abnesh Raina, Founder and CEO of PlumSlice Inc., a highly successful intrapreneur and a well-respected IT industry executive. Abnesh Raina has 20 years of IT executive experience building effective global teams and multi-channel commerce solutions. An award-winning CIO in 2009, he earned CIO Magazine’s CIO 100 Award for enabling business growth using technology innovation. His new company PlumSlice is a product management system that unites all players in the product development cycle as a single collaborative team on the cloud. The PlumSlice services and software make collaboration easy at all stages of the lifecycle: product design, development, product selection, vendor selection, product information, customer engagement and delivery. Knowing how the cloud works, PlumSlice supports the way people work and communicate today on mobile devices, socially, and globally. Prior to founding PlumSlice, Abnesh held CIO/VP level positions with Restoration Hardware, B/E Aerospace, and AMS (acquired by Baker & Taylor). He began his career as a software developer working for Williams Sonoma and Manhattan Associates. With special gratitude to him, here are four key take away (4KTA) points from his unique intrapreneurial experiences based on my discussions with him recently.


1. Alignment with Corporation – While there are similar characteristics in both an entrepreneur and intrapreneur, one key factor that helps an intrapreneur is having alignment with corporate goals. Many times, you as an intrapreneur may demonstrate your prototype first, then ask for permission. You, however, still need to do it within the confinement of the corporate culture. The benefits for an intrapreneur is having access to free resources, funding and infrastructure and the ability to play within a large sandbox. For instance, I felt, in a multi-billion dollar global commerce company, that driving ecommerce and mobile strategy would help it leapfrog its competitors. It will not only help position the company as the leading innovator in its market but also, may bring incremental revenue. However, at that time, company was facing operational challenges related to the supply chain. So we aligned with company’s immediate goals and demonstrated measurable success within eighteen months. By exhibiting results, I was given the approval for ecommerce and mobile project.


2. Support of the Organization – Once you are aligned with the corporate strategy, you need to have relationship, support and confidence in your competency from your organization for delivering the proposed results. You have to balance your risk taking attitude since rewards for success as an intrapreneur are not as high as an entrepreneur. The cost of failure is very high as you may get fired and hence the reason for having the support of organization, not just your higher-ups but also your colleagues at the similar level or below is a must. You can navigate the risk in a measurable way and the organization may accept some risk or small failures in a calculated way.