Ollie Pearn spoke with Emmanuel Pascart for our ‘Consultants Corner’ segment titled ‘Intrapreneur vs Entrepreneur‘. Emmanuel Pascart graduated from ESCP Business School and Supelec. He worked as an intrapreneur for many years without realising it. For twenty years, he created and developed new ecosystems within large industrial packaging and supply chain groups.
In late 2021, he published a French book titled Intrapreneurs: The Awakening of the Force with Editions Afnor. The book focuses on intrapreneurs and shares practical tools and insights for them.
At Morgan Latif, being entrepreneurial is one of our core values. All our consultants strive to demonstrate this every day. Therefore, discussing Intrapreneur vs Entrepreneur with Emmanuel felt highly relevant for ‘Consultants Corner’.
Q1. Why is being a great intrapreneur just as important as being a great entrepreneur?
“Intrapreneur and entrepreneur are crucial drivers of innovation. Let’s take the Steve Jobs example, he is probably the only guy to become the first entrepreneur and then intrapreneur in the same organisation. He began Apple and then was fired to only come back several years after as an intrapreneur to then launch Ipod and Ipad,” said Ollie Pearn on ‘Consultants Corner’.
Q2. What is your biggest achievement as an intrapreneur?
“A packaging company recruited me to think about a new optimized strategy on the creation of value and the margin towards more suitable markets.”
“This is a mission of cultural transformation with a very strong intrapreneurial dimension. The most difficult part was to manage a complex triptych: convincing both internal contributors, the board, externally new key customers and sustainable customers.”
“Many acquisitions have not been managed on a human level, therefore the organisation was in silos. There was not enough common DNA, which led to some tension between Local operations and Global organisations. The company habit was to push carton and packaging without customer-centric added value. I decided to set up a new market segment of the business with an approach to having a new customer centric value proposition working closely with manufacturing operations. A new way of working to capture new key customers and make sure the business will grow sustainably with key customers all through commercial excellence tools.”
Q3. What do you believe are the main characteristics that make a great intrapreneur?
“An intrapreneur looks at curiosity and exploration in a different way from an early age. They are usually a well-trained person, open to the world, and enter a company with a desire to transform it. An intrapreneur likes to solve problems. The only place where you could find problems is within an existing organisation for sure. Their motivation to innovate involves modifying an existing scheme,” highlighted Ollie Pearn in ‘Consultants Corner’ with ‘Intrapreneur vs Entrepreneur’.
“Serendipity, the ability to manage both long terms vision as a strategist and set up short and middle term actions on the ground. Then they require determination and hybrid skills between being a strategist and operational, with the ability to navigate in a complex organisation and a high customer experience to transform ideas in invoice and build a new P&L. It is important to be result driven with quick and dirty approach as well as to test and learn. Last but not least, an intrapreneur is up to date in understanding the power of digital power such as growth hacking tools to be visible and scale their organisation.”
To discuss this topic further please contact @olliepearn on LinkedIn.
