Why intrapreneurship is essential now more than ever, in a world defined by constant change

Somewhere between organisational self-preservation and creative reinvention lies the prevailing approach to change.

Most organisations still treat change as an event. Senior leaders announce a transformation, launch a programme and ask a small group to design the future. Everyone else is expected to keep delivering the present. What could possibly go wrong?

Apparently, a lot.  

According to Gartner’s 2025 research, only 32% of mid-to-senior business leaders said their most recent change initiative achieved healthy employee adoption. To put that in clearer terms – 2 out of 3 initiatives failed to translate intended change into sustainable action. 

This pattern is familiar to most leaders. It was challenging enough without AI, shifting customer expectations, economic volatility and new regulation changing the conditions of work simultaneously. The World Economic Forum estimates that nearly 40% of the skills required on the job will change by 2030. That should make all leaders feel a sense of anxiety. Despite this, many organisations remain anchored in a leadership axiom built for a more predictable era: leaders decide; others execute.

This creates an invisible problem. The need to adapt is accelerating, but senior leaders still hold most of the authority to respond.

The answer is not another innovation hub or project team. They have their place of course. But organisations seeking creative diversity must awaken the capability already inside them. Intrapreneurs are employees who notice what others miss, imagine what is possible and mobilise people to turn possibility into progress. 

In 1968, 3M scientist Spencer Silver developed an adhesive that appeared to have failed: it stuck lightly, could be removed and left little residue. Years later, colleague Art Fry saw its potential when bookmarks kept falling from his church hymnal. Using Silver’s adhesive, he created the Post-it Note. This breakthrough emerged because 3M gave employees room to explore ideas, experiment across boundaries and pursue value before certainty existed. Talent mattered. But so did the environment that allowed a failed adhesive and a falling bookmark to find each other.

Intrapreneurship does not flourish because leaders ask for more ideas. Ideas are not the constraint; conditions are. Leadership’s new job is not to know everything, but to make responsible initiative possible. This enabling leader is becoming the organisation’s most important innovation infrastructure.

As AI commoditises information and analysis, knowledge becomes abundant. The more scarce capability is increasingly human: framing the right problem, exercising judgement, constructing decision processes, connecting perspectives and building enough trust for people to act together. Leaders can no longer be the organisation’s sole source of answers. The problems they face are too interdependent, fast-moving and dispersed across functions. 

The people closest to end-users, fragile processes and emerging risks often see problems first, yet have the least authority to act. Leaders respond with portfolios, workstreams and approval-heavy business cases — even when a small experiment would reveal more, faster.

The quiet suffocation of creativity

Most organisations do not deliberately suppress innovation. Their systems simply protect what already works.

Performance measures reward predictable delivery. Governance favours evidence before experimentation. Departments celebrate successful outcomes, while the abandoned prototype, disproved assumption or useful failure quietly vanishes. Employees quickly learn the cultural equation: certainty is competence; uncertainty is risk.

Two fallacies then take hold. The first is the status quo fallacy: if today’s approach still works, there is no reason to question it. The second is the fallacy of centricity: if a leader cannot see a different way of doing things, it cannot be valid. Together, they turn past success into a constraint on future relevance.

This is the corporate immune system at work. Over time, employees learn to wait — for permission, sponsorship and certainty. Initiative retreats, fewer ideas reach even a small experiment, and the organisation falls back on familiar solutions. As adaptation slows and transformation disappoints, pressure on leaders rises, prompting them to tighten control and begin the cycle again.

Building creative pathways 

The enabling leader’s role is not to be the inventor-in-chief, but the architect of agency. They do not offer unlimited freedom or create a business filled with uncontrolled entrepreneurial types. Instead, they design a culture where uncertainty is welcomed. Where employees can surface ideas, test assumptions and experiment without expectation. This is where creativity lives. 

So, what are the tactics that the enabling leader employs?

First, hold regular end-user pain-point forums where recurring frustrations and customer issues are openly shared. Use dashboards to track not only performance, but friction: delayed decisions, circular problems and manual interventions. Innovation begins with better observation, which is why intrapreneurs begin as anthropologists.

Second, replace premature business cases with bounded experiments. Give a cross-functional swarm team 30 days to test one assumption, with a named sponsor, and explicit guardrails. Ask three questions: Who benefits? Why now? What is the smallest test that could produce evidence? This turns uncertainty from a reason to stop into something the organisation can investigate.

Third, change what is rewarded. Build experimentation into personal objectives and leadership reviews. Think of creativity and innovation as a capability to improve rather than a department. Focus on how it happens, not just what comes out. Track ideas tested, the range of functions involved, the quality of learning and the number of decisions impacted. The aim is not to make every idea succeed. It is to make every experiment teach.

Finally, communicate which ideas moved forward, which did not and why. Recognition matters, but transparency matters more. When people can see a fair path from idea to decision, initiative stops feeling performative.

The future will not belong to the firms with the largest innovation budgets. It will belong to those that unlock the imagination already sitting inside them. Those that make imagination operational.

Intrapreneurs create movement; enabling leaders build the runway. In a world defined by constant volatility, that is no longer a progressive leadership preference. It’s a survival capability.