A new free initiative is aiming to help start-ups across Swindon and Wiltshire to access short-term support from top tech talent.
The Intrapreneurship Project will allow businesses to borrow resources, such as software developers and designers, one day a week for a 12-week period at no cost.
The programme will also give individuals in tech and product roles at established companies the opportunity to develop entrepreneurial skills first-hand as part of a living, breathing start-up.
The Swindon-based organisation is led by former tech founders Shane Moore and Hamlyn Deas, who first developed the concept while building their own Techies award-winning start-up in their spare time.
Hamlyn Deas said, “Enterprise businesses are having to work very hard to keep up with the pace of newer, more agile companies, but they face this paradox where it’s really difficult to innovate without an entrepreneurial mindset. This is where our idea for the Intrapreneurship Programmes came from.
“An Intrapreneur is someone who thinks and acts like an entrepreneur, but within a larger organisation. Instead of venturing off to build something new, they are questioning the way things work around them and looking for ways to repurpose and rebuild to solve problems.
“We built our start-up outside of full-time jobs, and we were quick to realise just how much we were accelerating our own learning. Every week it felt like we had new skills and insight that we could bring back into our day-to-day, which made us more valuable to the companies we worked for and more employable when it came to finding new opportunities.
“We’re looking for founders that can provide our candidates with a learning environment that emulates this experience and can lead by example when it comes to championing those entrepreneurial values. We’re building our network more and more every day, working closely with those start-ups to understand their skill shortages so that we can find the best match for them from our list of available candidates.
“We’re hoping to run our first programme later this year with our first major client. Our number one priority is to demonstrate that running a programme like this can lead to a measurable increase in entrepreneurial thinking in candidates. If we can prove that, then we can offer more opportunities for founders that need support and resources and help shape the next generation of intrapreneurs in the process.”
Startups interested in taking part can register here to be considered for upcoming Intrapreneurship Programmes in 2021 and beyond.
