It's not about having Ideas - IT's about Making Ideas Happen! Fostering Exploratory Innovation with the Intrapreneur Accelerator

Organizations usually strive for innovation to achieve economic growth. Thereby, incremental innovation of e.g., existing products is often the most attractive way because it is plannable to a certain extent and often reveals short-term success. However, many markets change due to new competitive structures caused by the rise of digital services, which facilitates market entries of new companies. For an incumbent firm trying to cope with these competitors, exploitation of existing ideas and technologies (i.e., incremental innovation) is not enough. Although these firms usually pay minor attention to it, they need to additionally explore how to establish disruptive innovation that complements or even changes their traditional business model before competitors do. In this contribution, we present a novel structure to foster exploratory innovation within incumbent organizations by unleashing the innovative potential of intrapreneurs as peripheral innovators: the Intrapreneur Accelerator. We consider this novel structure a service system for supporting intrapreneurs to develop and implement extraordinary ideas and thus fostering exploratory innovation for the organization. Using a design science approach, we will further present our methodology and our preliminary results, since we have already conducted two of four design iterations.