Building an Intrapreneurial Team: Recruitment and Roles
This paper examines the process of building and staffing an intrapreneurial team within a parent organization, using a financial technology venture as a working example. It begins by identifying the problem-solving team as the appropriate structure for intrapreneurial work, emphasizing fluid roles and creative conflict over rigid functional hierarchies. The paper then addresses recruitment strategy, detailing how hand-picked internal candidates are combined with external talent, and how the parent company's HR infrastructure can be leveraged while still accommodating the flexibility intrapreneurship demands. Finally, it outlines three foundational roles — financial expert, software developer, and business manager — along with compensation approaches that balance base salary with equity-based incentives.
- The Problem-Solving Team in an Intrapreneurial Context: Justifies fluid, innovation-focused problem-solving team structure
- Recruitment Strategy: Internal and External Talent: Blends hand-picked insiders with external talent pipeline
- Leveraging the Parent Company's HR Infrastructure: Uses parent HR resources while navigating bureaucratic tension
- Key Roles and Job Descriptions: Defines financial, technical, and managerial founding roles
- Compensation and Incentive Structure: Balances competitive salary with equity-based motivation
- References: Cited sources from business and management publications
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What makes this paper effective
- The paper maintains a consistent applied focus, moving logically from team structure to recruitment to roles to compensation without losing its practical thread.
- It draws a clear and useful distinction between intrapreneurship and traditional corporate hiring, helping the reader understand why standard HR procedures need adaptation.
- The use of concrete examples — such as the financial expert, programmer, and business manager — grounds abstract intrapreneurial concepts in recognizable workplace roles.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper demonstrates applied organizational theory: it takes established concepts (team typology, intrapreneurship, compensation design) from the management literature and applies them directly to a specific hypothetical scenario. Citations from Inc. Magazine, Forbes, and the Legal Transformation Institute are integrated to support practical claims rather than purely theoretical ones, which is appropriate for a business or management course paper.
Structure breakdown
The paper opens by selecting and justifying a team type, then addresses recruitment in two stages (initial hand-picking, then broader search), moves into the tension between intrapreneurial flexibility and corporate HR formality, describes three founding roles in detail, and closes with a compensation philosophy that links salary security to equity upside. Each section builds on the previous one in a linear, problem-solution pattern.
The Problem-Solving Team in an Intrapreneurial Context
The type of team that will be utilized for this endeavor is a problem-solving team. There are several different types of teams, but the problem-solving team is one that can be utilized to generate new ideas. This type of team will be comprised of subject matter experts — such as those with financial expertise and those with computer programming expertise — working within a financial context. These experts will come together with only loosely defined roles. The team will not necessarily be a cross-functional team, because it will not be focused on having specific functional roles. Instead, the team will be sufficiently fluid in its structure to allow different members to evolve into roles best suited to their contributions to the effort.
This team is fundamentally about improving innovation. To foster that innovation, there must be incentive to be creative, and a certain degree of productive conflict must be cultivated to ensure that the ideas generated by the team are of the highest standard and serve to increase return on investment (ROI).
Recruitment Strategy: Internal and External Talent
Recruitment for an intrapreneurship project is unique in that the project will need people from both the internal organization and the external labor market. An intrapreneur typically begins with a core idea and has the support of senior management to allocate resources from the parent organization. As a result, the parent organization will be willing to allow some internal recruitment. Initially, this will include hand-picked individuals — those who have demonstrated the ability to work well with the intrapreneur and who possess the skills and attributes needed to contribute to the team.
The different skills and attributes required must first be identified, and then individuals chosen who best fit those needs. Once the initial team is assembled, the intrapreneur can assess what skills and attributes are still needed and open the competition for remaining positions to both internal and external candidates. The external talent pool is especially important because it allows the intrapreneur to bring in outside perspectives and ideas that can help the new unit become more creative and flexible in its approaches.
The intrapreneurial spirit should be supported by the parent company through making internal talent available to the new unit. One of the most important elements of intrapreneurship is the ability to draw on internal resources. Even beyond the initial hand-picked team, there will be opportunities to add internal candidates, and the parent company should make those resources available.
Leveraging the Parent Company's HR Infrastructure
One of the principal benefits of intrapreneurship is that the parent company provides existing resources. For the recruiting process, the intrapreneur will use the parent company's existing human resources infrastructure to conduct all hiring (Myler, 2014). This is important because it means the new unit will not need to invest time and money in building its own HR infrastructure. However, it also means that the new unit's leadership will need to explain the unit, its purpose, and the roles it is hiring for very clearly to a human resources department that may be accustomed to a higher degree of formality.
One of the inherent hazards of operating with an intrapreneurial mindset within a large company is that the flexibility intrapreneurship demands can struggle to coexist with the formality of a large organization. As a result, the intrapreneur will use the HR resources available but will need to work very closely with that department to ensure it fully understands the project and its needs before hiring begins — whether internally or externally (Kubicki, 2014). It will be best if a dedicated human resources liaison is embedded within the new unit to oversee how the parent company's HR resources are being used.
Key Roles and Job Descriptions
Because this is an intrapreneurial team built on a loosely defined concept, there will be no formal job descriptions at the outset. Roles have not yet been fully defined, so issuing rigid job descriptions at this stage would be premature. In most entrepreneurial organizations, a small group of people handles everything, wearing many proverbial hats. The earliest members of this team will operate the same way.
The first general role will be that of the financial expert. Over time, the vision is for this person to lead a team of financial professionals whose function is to study the market and apply their expertise toward determining how the company can increase profitability. The financial expert will therefore need extensive experience in the financial field — particularly in mortgages — so that they can analyze mortgage markets and identify the most effective ways to expand access to credit in a manner that is profitable for the company.
The second key role will be the software developer. This person will build the software platform that financial professionals will use to assess mortgage eligibility and identify pathways to improved credit access. This individual must have significant experience in programming and project management, and will also be responsible for assembling a team of programming professionals to work on distinct components of the final software product. Both the software developer and the financial expert are the primary creative intrapreneurs driving this project. Because creativity is essential to these roles, both individuals should have considerable flexibility to define and shape their own positions.
The third founding role will be the business manager. This person must bring project management and human resources expertise, as the role involves assembling and growing the new unit's team. The business manager will be ultimately responsible for developing role definitions, acting as liaison with the Human Resources Department, and recruiting strong internal candidates. This person is the organizer — the one who leads much of the critical support work that enables the two creative leads to do their best work.
In all cases, these individuals need to have several years of relevant experience, because this is an organization that must achieve results quickly given the resources the parent company is committing to the project. This is not an environment for on-the-job learning; a high degree of demonstrated professionalism and prior experience in comparable projects is required. That said, because these individuals will be hand-picked, they may not conform to a rigid checklist of qualifications. Formal job descriptions are not congruent with intrapreneurial ideals, which emphasize creativity, innovation, and freeing people from bureaucratic constraints — a rigid bureaucracy is antithetical to intrapreneurship (Bacharach, 2015).
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