SMPs Encouraging Intrapreneurship

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Many SMPs encourage entrepreneurial spirit among their employees. ‘Intrapreneurship’ enables employees use their entrepreneurial skills while benefiting from the resources, capabilities and security of the current organisation, and learning from possible failures without the personal risks that entrepreneurship entails.[1]

This is both an exceptional development opportunity for SMP employees and could also contribute to innovation across the firm. Tapping into a diverse pool of ideas and skills might help create cost efficiencies and identify new growth opportunities for firms.

SMP as an incubator for future business ideas

Desmond Yiong, Avic Dkky Pte Ltd. Singapore

Singapore-based Avic Dkky Pte Ltd Corporate Advisory is a professional services firm, providing a comprehensive range of business services, including accountancy and bookkeeping, tax and corporate recovery.

The practice has a highly open collaborative culture, and maintains strong links with alumni.

We welcome the entrepreneurial spirit – if their aspiration is to set up their own firm, we can help pass them work’, says Desmond Yiong. ‘Staff are encouraged to discuss their ambitions openly during appraisals, and even to use the firm’s infrastructure as a sort of incubator. Other staff have also left to take up CFO roles in Taiwan and become valuable client contacts’, Desmond says.

Though Yiong says he is still ‘formally the boss’, the partners do not try to micromanage younger colleagues:

‘We empower them to make decisions, we work together with them’, he says. ‘A long as a given task is completed in a given time, they are free to do other stuff’.

Open discussion and collaborative working have become sources of fresh ideas, and satisfy millennials’ need to understand the purpose and meaning of their work.

Facing a tight employment market, Yiong has also started employing part-timers, and combining this with a social mission:

‘My focus is caregivers, people who need part-time work and who can take a few hours off and come and do something for us to help with household costs’.

The firm has no set formula for reskilling staff. They are encouraged to take charge of their own learning and development and to maximise their use of information resources available freely on the internet, but the firm will invest where necessary:

 ‘We try to be forward looking and practical and prepare for the future’.


Adapted from the original ACCA Careers in Small and Medium Practices (SMP) report. The full version of the report can be accessed here


[1]  Find our more in the ACCA Professional Accountants – the Future: Generation Next report

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