Create a Culture for Thriving Internal Innovators

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As a professor at Florida International University (FIU), I am fortunate to contribute to conversations that connect academic insight with the strategic realities facing today’s leaders.

Recently, FIU’s Luxury Leadership Forum invited me to write about intrapreneurship: the often overlooked force behind the majority of the most impactful innovations in modern business.

The result is The Intrapreneur Advantage. The article begins with a simple idea: many of the most powerful innovations in modern business did not start with entrepreneurs disrupting from the outside. They began with intrapreneurs, people already inside large organizations who saw a possibility that others had missed and found a way to move it forward.

Gmail. Amazon Web Services. PlayStation. Post-it Notes. These were not startup stories in the traditional sense. They were internal experiments that became transformational platforms, products, and businesses.

That is the point worth pausing on.

Most companies are not short on talent. They are not even short on ideas. In many cases, the next meaningful growth opportunity is already sitting somewhere inside the organization, in the mind of an engineer, strategist, designer, frontline employee or business unit leader.

The real question is whether the company has created the conditions for that idea to rise to the surface and into the market.

This matters even more now because the pace of change has made centralized innovation too slow. Leaders can no longer assume that the best strategic insight will come only from the boardroom, the annual planning process, or the formal innovation team. The people closest to customers, technologies, suppliers and operational constraints are often the first to see when something important is shifting.

They see the friction before it becomes a crisis. They see the workaround before it becomes a product. They see the unmet need before it shows up in the data.

But seeing is not enough.

For an idea to become strategy, it needs a path.

This connects closely to work I have been doing for years on employee-driven innovation, including my book Driving Innovation from Within and my recent Harvard Business Review article, New Research Shows How an “Idea Marketplace” Can Boost Innovation.

An idea marketplace is exactly what it sounds like: a system that helps ideas move to where they can create value. In most organizations, ideas remain trapped in silos. Someone close to a customer sees a problem. Someone in another function has a possible solution. Someone else has resources, authority, or technical knowledge that could help. But without a mechanism to connect these pieces, the idea disappears before it has a chance to grow.

In a follow-up piece, HBR Nailed the Why — Here’s the How, I explored how leaders can begin turning that insight into action by using AI to help discover needs and solutions, match them, value them, prioritize them, and mobilize the best ideas into execution.

And in The Hidden Cost of Missed Ideas, I explored the idea through a more urgent and personal example: animal shelters. Every year, many dogs are euthanized not because no one wants them, but because the right potential adopter never sees them. Someone in one part of the country may be looking for exactly the kind of dog sitting unnoticed in a shelter somewhere else.

That is, at its core, an idea marketplace problem. There is demand. There is supply. What is missing is a more intelligent way to connect them.

The piece uses that example to show how AI-powered idea marketplaces could help surface hidden matches, connect people with possibilities they would not otherwise see, and reduce unwanted and unnecessary euthanasia by helping more dogs find homes.

This is not simply about collecting more suggestions. Most organizations already have more ideas than they can process. The opportunity is to make the flow of ideas more intelligent, more connected, and more strategically useful. A robust idea marketplace helps promising concepts find champions, resources, and relevance before they are dismissed as too early, too small or too far from the current business model.

But systems alone are not enough.

Culture determines whether people actually use them.

That is where Marcus Collins’ work on culture becomes especially relevant. Collins often explains that culture shapes what people inside a group believe is normal, acceptable, and rewarded. In other words, culture tells people what kind of behavior belongs.

If employees believe curiosity is welcomed, they share more. If they believe challenging assumptions is safe, they speak up sooner. If they believe ideas outside their job description will be taken seriously, they begin to act more like intrapreneurs.

The opposite is also true. If people learn that new ideas create political risk, slow promotion, or disappear into a process that never responds, they stop offering them. Not because they lack creativity, but because the culture has taught them that creativity is not worth the cost.

A culture that cultivates intrapreneurs does something rare. It allows people to think beyond their formal roles while still aligning their energy with the company’s larger strategic direction. It gives curiosity room to breathe. It creates space for experimentation without disconnecting from performance. It helps organizations adapt faster because learning is no longer confined to the top of the hierarchy.

In the FIU piece, I explore how companies like Amazon, NVIDIA, Adobe, Starbucks, Microsoft, Google and 3M have benefited from internal innovators who were given enough room to act.

But the larger lesson applies to any organization trying to compete in a faster, more uncertain world.

The next transformative idea inside your company probably already exists.

The strategic challenge is creating the environment where it can emerge, be recognized, and become real.

You can read the full FIU piece here: The Intrapreneur Advantage.