Unlocking Intrapreneurship With Language

Cheryl Heller designs change and growth for business leaders and social entrepreneurs. She is Founding Chair of MFA Design for Social Innovation at SVA.

If it is true, as has been said, that all change begins with language, then it is equally true that the inability to change begins with language as well.

The wealth of jargon used to describe intrapreneurship (itself a bit of jargon), innovation and corporate social responsibility is more exhausting than enriching, and as their importance becomes more evident, the labels and complexities grow. What’s the difference between corporate social responsibility, cause branding, cause marketing, and a triple (or sometimes lately double, as if we can just decide to leave the environment out of it) bottom line? Should companies now stop all their work on sustainability in order to focus on resilience? Has all independent thinking, or even perhaps all generative thinking inside big organizations become intrapreneurship?  What’s the difference between social innovation and innovation? What’s the relationship between design thinking and innovation? What’s the difference between disruptive innovation and incremental innovation? Is some innovation more innovative than others and is more innovation always better? And does anybody else see this as a silly and dangerously circuitous trap of our own devising?

Intrepreneurship, innovation and corporate social responsibility (along with all their nuanced pseudonyms) are labels for... [continue reading]