Thomas Carey is co-Principal Catalyst for the Workplace Innovation Network for Canada, Executive-in-Residence with the Monash University Faculty of Arts and a former Associate Vice-President at the University of Waterloo.
Anahita Baregheh is an Associate Professor at Nipissing University’s School of Business and WINCan’s Research Director.
Jennifer Justice is an Accountant with Kendall Sinclair Cowper & Daigle LLP in North Bay (Ontario) and a graduate from Nipissing University’s School of Business.
This post presents our final proof-of-concept test of our prototype professional development Ladder of Opportunities in Workplace Innovation in the work domain of Accountancy. These tests were intended to identify how well the framework fits with what we know about workplace innovation in a specific workplace domain and to identify some of the context-specific issues to be addressed for the framework to be used productively. Previous posts looked at Job Crafting, Innovation Adaptation (including specific examples from the Audit area) and Design Innovation (with a focus on Design Thinking in Accountancy).
Intrapreneurship – or Intrapreneurial Thinking – and Accountancy
We identified a number of examples of Entrepreneurship related to Accountancy, for example in accounting firms breaking new ground by providing all services online [Junior & Galvão 2021; Lizote et al 2021] and in the use of service design and service blueprints to generate a novel business model for a new accounting firm [Kalogiannidou 2018].
Intrapreneurship examples in Accountancy were harder to come by. Intrapreneurial activities involve employees conceiving, developing and promoting new products, services, ventures and business models within the organizational – but going beyond current models and structures. We suspect that some of the ‘Big Four’ firms surveyed in our post on Innovation Adaptation in Auditing may have intrapreneurial activities underway within their innovation umbrella…just that we did not locate case story descriptions which could be incorporated as Illustration or Practice case stories to customize our workplace innovation resources and learning activities for this specific work domain.
However, this doesn’t mean that intrapreneurial activities lie outside professional boundaries for Accountancy (despite the highly regulated nature of the work domain). For example, one corporate Chief Financial Officer has described how he and some of his internal Accountancy colleagues have begun the journey From Accountant to Intrapreneur within their company [Williams 2020]:
We’ve learned to apply lean, start-up, based principles to internal projects, developed some great initiatives for our business and worked together on something different than the usual challenges facing us as leaders in the business. I think that the processes we worked through would be valuable for anyone delivering projects in a business, but particularly for people in the finance function.
My profession has evolved over the last couple of decades, with finance people contributing in different ways and leading businesses far more than when I started out. I’ve certainly worked with people who would regard entrepreneurial thinking from a finance team as unwelcome, but I think the business-facing accountant for the 2020’s and beyond not only needs to be an intrapreneur, but that our training and mindsets make us ideal for this role.
References:
Junior, A. C., & Galvão, C. R. (2021). Organizational Innovation in Accounting Services: Analysis of Virtual Accounting Offices in Brazil. REVISTA GEINTEC-GESTAO INOVACAO E TECNOLOGIAS, 11(4), 225-235.
Lizote, S. A., Zawadzki, P., & Chaudhuri, M. R. (2021). Entrepreneurial competencies of accounting services firm owners. Revista Pensamento Contemporâneo em Administração, 15(4), 70-81.
Kalogiannidou, E. (2018). Taxwise-Designing a New Business Model for an accounting company. Accounting. M. Thesis, International Hellenic University.
Williams, C. (2020). “From Accountant to Intrapreneur”. LinkedIn blog post, Jan 31, 2020. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/accountant-intrapreneur-chris-williams/
Intrapreneurship in Promoting Innovation Adaptation in Accounting
Our description below is excerpted and adapted from a broader study [Curtis et al 2020] whose focus was the factors affecting intrapreneurial intentions within the Accounting profession
Continuous Monitoring is a methodology that provides for the electronic observation of organizational activities online/ real-time. Continuous Monitoring offers many potential benefits to management accountants, e.g., supporting and enhancing the key activities of management accountants, which include decision support, and planning and control.
Although Continuous Monitoring is useful for management accountants to achieve their roles within the organization, the predicted growth of this technology has not been achieved. Adoption of Continuous Monitoring by an accounting firm might be expected to follow an Innovation Adaptation path. However, because the impact of Continuous Monitoring is firm-wide, it is unlikely that individuals or small teams could launch a pilot initiative on their own. On the other hand, the impetus for such an initiative is unlikely to follow a top-down innovation Adaptation path, because knowledge of the capabilities and possibilities of Continuous Monitoring resides with those at technical – rather than executive – levels.
The most likely path therefore begins at the grassroots level: a management accountant in the field recognizes an opportunity for Continuous Monitoring to positively impact the organization and champions its use upward through the corporate hierarchy. This requires capability in Intrapreneurship, for employees who are in the position to understand the innovation’s potential benefits and to sell that potential up the management ladder.
For our purposes, the key insight in this example lies in the combination of employee Intrapreneurial activities as a pre-requisite to a workplace Innovation Adaptation initiative (rather than the usual intrapreneurial results of a new internal venture, a novel service or an expansion into new market). We now see this relationship having implications in many other professional domains.
References:
Curtis, M. B., Chui, L., & Pavur, R. J. (2020). Intention to champion continuous monitoring: A study of intrapreneurial innovation in organizations. Journal of Emerging Technologies in Accounting, 17(2).
A Final Example: Policy Intrapreneurship for Accounting
Another identified opportunity for Intrapreneurship related to Accountancy occurs in the agencies who set regulatory standards for the profession, and the role of “Policy Entrepreneurship” in setting the agenda for policy updates and new regulatory initiatives. Policy Entrepreneurship is described as…
(While “Intrapreneurship” is not commonly used in discussion of Policy Entrepreneurship, this term has recently begun to appear [Emas & Jones 2021] and seems to be a better fit since there are no new ventures being created: the new policies are implemented by an ongoing agency as extensions of its mandate. )
In a study of Policy Entrepreneurship in the Australian regulatory agency – the Australian Accounting Standards Board [Schurer 2018] – many of the personal traits and professional activities noted in Policy Entrepreneurs would fit easily into frameworks for Intrapreneurship. For example, the researchers noted three characteristic aspects which any new policy initiative needs to address:
value acceptance (the idea needs to be acceptable to the wider population);
technical aspects (is the idea technically feasible? What needs to be addressed to make it technically work?); and
anticipated future constraints (what potential issues might arise from the idea?).
These characteristics echo the classical “desirability, feasibility, viability” triad in Design Thinking [Brown 2009]. Again, as in the previous example, we foresee further application of the Policy Intrapreneurship idea across other professional domains.
References:
Brown, T. (2009). Change by design: How design thinking creates new alternatives for business and society. Collins Business.
Emas, R., & Jones, J. C. (2021). Setting the table for policy intrapreneurship: public administrator perspectives on local food system governance. Policy Design and Practice, 1-15.
Schührer, S. (2018). Identifying policy entrepreneurs of public sector accounting agenda setting in Australia. Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal.
This project was supported in part by a grant from eCampus Ontario’s Virtual Learning System program.
[TC2]Link to 2022.01 when it is available
[TC3]Link to 2021.12 when it is available