Abstract:

Intrapreneurship is the act of behaving as an entrepreneur but inside an organisation. This requires that members of the organisation to have certain soft skills (problem solving, creativity, planing, risk management…) but also attitudes (innovation, passion, engagement...), that can be taught. However, they can only be learnt informally, that is inside a team and after years of collaboration. Intrapreneurship has been demonstrated to be very beneficial for large organisations but also for small enterprises and start-ups, looking for innovation and competitiveness.

The Erasmus+ Intranet project (www.intra-net.org) aims at creating ICT-based tools which can be adopted by teams or staff, inside organisations, to promote the acquisition of new skills and competence in a network based methodology (that is through collaborating and creating links between staff). Also, to use the ICT tools on activities to help innovative organisations in their mission towards the development of new products, increase competitiveness, solve challenges and help to build collaborative innovative teams.

During the first phase of the project we defined the requirements and needs of the staff and the organisations to help to create innovative teams. This papers shows the results of the second phase, that is the preliminary test of the activities. 10 Learning activities have been defined, 3 of them have been implemented and tested. All activities proposed are collaborative but each of them is focused on certain skills and attitudes, that is: innovation, creativity, knowledge discovery, experience management, risks management, from self-motivation to team building, quality assurance, planning and strategy roadmap, questioning tools and collective learn-teach.

We can conclude that even ICT-based activities can be useful to help to acquire certain skills and to promote intrapreneurship inside organisations, team building is a rather long term activity. It is required the participation of a trainer, coach or leader, depending on the maturity of the team. Therefore, we also concluded the need of a guide for trainers or a leader, in case the group has reached sufficient maturity, to train the staff and promote their learning. Even so, the person involved as a leader should have three extra capacities which haven’t been explored yet: capacity for media communication, organisational vision, and team building. Those will activate staff’s inner motivation towards the organisation aims. In this aspect we could conclude that ICT tools should be re-designed for a meta-level that helps leader on their tasks: observe, analyse, support, encourage, and build relationships among members.

Keywords:

Intrapreneurship, soft skills, informal learning, ICT-based activities, team building.