Driving Innovation from Within: A Guide for Internal Entrepreneurs

Conventional wisdom tells us that entrepreneurs are society’s main source of innovation. Young founders leave college with a big idea, get to work in a garage, and build something that changes the world. Typical corporate employees, strangled by slow-moving bureaucracy, are blocked from making transformative discoveries.

In Driving Innovation from Within, strategist and advisor Kaihan Krippendorff disproves one of today’s biggest business myths to highlight the lessons for innovators and leaders. He reveals how most of the modern world’s most impactful creations were invented by passionate employee-innovators. If it were left up to go-it-alone entrepreneurs, we would not have mobile phones, personal computers, or email. Distilling over 150 interviews with internal innovators and leading experts along with insights from the latest research and today’s most successful companies, from Tencent and Amazon to Mastercard and Starbucks, Krippendorff lays out a step-by-step playbook to unlock innovation from the inside. He maps the barriers that frustrate efforts to disrupt from within and provides tools to remove them, detailing how visionary leaders can create islands of freedom inside an organization to activate existing employees’ potential and beat startups at their own game. Driving Innovation from Within offers a practical and inspiring guide to leadership from all levels for those who want the fulfillment of impacting the world without leaving their job in order to do it.