An employee who is both willing and able to develop and implement innovative solutions, thereby adding surprising value to some or all of the organization’s stakeholders.
Gallup[i] has documented that the national employee engagement rate is 30%. As a result, year after year HR professionals are spending a lot of time, energy and money attempting to move as many workers as possible up from the disengaged 70%, with little success. However, engaging the disengaged might be the wrong goal. Instead, they should consider moving some of the already-engaged 30% to a higher tier. This higher tier is in the realm of intrapreneurship, where people are not only willing but also able to create unexpected value.
Upgrading even one person from engaged to intrapreneur can create more value than migrating a larger number of disengaged people to the engaged group.