Incisive Consultants LLC is ready to cultivate innovation through its new intrapreneurship program, which launched earlier this year. Not only will it lead to new service offerings and diversified revenue, but it removes barriers to entrepreneurship for employees and others.
"We believe there's a large set of people within our network that are super smart and want to be entrepreneurs, but the barriers and risk that come with starting your own company are often too great for folks," Chief Revenue Officer Corey Kosch said. "It's really easy to be an entrepreneur when you're younger and don't necessarily have a whole lot of people relying on you. As you become more tenured in your career, risks like starting your own company turn a lot of people off."
By eliminating barriers to entrepreneurship, Overland Park-based Incisive is opening itself up to a "whole pool of awesome ideas" that previously went untapped, he said. The firm provides services related to health care IT.
The idea for the program was born out of the co-founders' previous company, Sagacious Consultants. The company's consultants would approach leadership with "wonderful ideas," but Sagacious lacked a formal structure to cultivate them, Incisive CEO and co-founder Chris Blackerby said.
Although some ideas led to new service offerings, the lack of structure created challenges and missteps, said Kosch, who was part of the leadership team that guided Sagacious through its sale to Accenture. Building a formal program expedites innovation and allows Incisive to do it at scale, he said.
Kosch, who joined Incisive in December, helped spearhead the intrapreneurship program. Several applicants are moving through the pipeline. The program fits one of his goals for the electronic health record consulting company — diversifying revenue streams and products/services.
It's not uncommon at companies for the leadership team to become distanced from the challenges that clients face, but employees on the front lines are able to spot the real pain points and conceive better solutions, Kosch said.
Blackerby said he views Incisive "as this app store where folks are creating ideas, but we're solution-based, and it's not just fun stuff that might make you laugh or waste time on your phone."
The new program already is attracting new hires, he said. Even if someone doesn't think of the idea, there's still room to help out.
"It's absolutely a great recruiting tool and a retention tool," Blackerby said, adding that one recent hire is moving his idea through the program.
The intrapreneurship program isn't limited to Incisive employees. The company is open to hearing ideas from its network and beyond. The process includes multiple stages, starting with an application, which has the potential to move toward ideation to formalize a business plan. From there, Incisive will decide whether to sign an agreement, which outlines how many months it will provide support to build out the concept before testing it with a client. Intrapreneurs are compensated at an hourly rate along the way.
If all goes well, the company will scale the offering or product to additional clients, and the intrapreneurs will receive a competitive salary and a share in revenue generated from the idea.
"My long-term goal is that this program becomes a differentiator for us, and it's the way that we continue to attract and retain top talent and really start to diversify our services, not just within Epic clients and consulting services, but health care IT in general," Kosch said.
