Is Intrapreneurship Scalable? The Challenge Of Managing A Massive Internal Startup Call

Intrapreneurship has long been identified as a means to increase the ability of firms to innovate. But can it, beyond exceptional champions, serve as a basis for the development of an innovation function capable of producing sustained radical innovation? In practice, the space of " deviance " left to collaborators for local initiatives favors more problem solving than radical innovation, and duos of champions & sponsors are too few to transform the firm. Can new collaborative technologies, including corporate social networks, that are increasingly used to organize " crowd-based " idea generation processes within firms, help to scale-up intrapreneurship processes? In this article, we analyze a large-scale initiative deployed in a major French bank, Société Générale: the " Internal Startup Call " that involved both collaborators and the top-management team. Through a case study based on collaborative research, we analyze the disruptive potential and the limits associated with this challenge implemented this year during the bank.