Deloitte to foster intrapreneurship with 25 million fund
Today’s brightest minds are chasing the dreams of creating successful start-ups. To tap into the potential of the entrepreneurial spirit within Deloitte’s innovation capital, it is offering its staff the opportunity to follow their dream idea through a newly released ‘intrapreneurship’ programme.
Deloitte is offering its workers the best of both worlds. It has created a £25 million pound fund which can be accessed by its own employees that have innovative business ideas. "We have some of the most entrepreneurial minds in the country right here in our organisation and we want to give them the opportunity to develop in unique ways,” says Simon Owen, Managing Partner for Innovation at Deloitte. So far 50 business ideas have been put forward by employees.
During their undertaking the employee will remain part of Deloitte and will continued to be paid by them. They will have access to capital from the fund, as well as access to various experts within Deloitte, such as legal, risk, technology, brand, marketing and other support from within the firm. The plan is to foster a number of ideas within a highly charged and structured environment.
Yet just as with many start-ups, “we’ve got to be realistic, not all of these will be the next generation [of companies]. When it doesn’t work, we will shut it down in an orderly fashion. The employees will remain part of Deloitte and they will return to the mothership... There is no financial risk for them,” says Owen.
Most of the successfully created businesses will fall, legally, under Deloitte’s Innovation Investments. The ideas offered by the employee will therefore not be their own. However, Deloitte will offer a reward for the author of the business ideas that become profitable or returns from a business sold, and will “ensure mutual benefit for the entrepreneur and the firm”.
Deloitte is not the only consultancy concern experimenting with new ways to create opportunities, last year KPMG launched a £61.9 million Big Data investment arm to accelerate innovation in big data analytics, although the fund focuses on external investments.
