Fostering Intrapreneurship to Improve Readiness and Retention: Innovative Behaviors to Bolster the Navy's Talent Management Efforts

Abstract

The United States Navy (USN) is facing challenges in its continuous efforts to leverage the full creative potential of its junior workforce to drive grassroots innovation and meet operational readiness and retention goals. Despite sincere intent and encouraging rhetoric from senior leaders, the Navy is not experiencing the level of junior officer (JO) engagement within its problem-solving and innovation ecosystems needed to noticeably impact performance, readiness and modernization objectives. Conversely, JO feedback is often bottlenecked at the tactical level within occupationally constrained designator silos commonly known as communities. This thesis explores deliberately fostering intrapreneurship among tactical-level leaders as a method to release the large pool of untapped insights and deliver them to the appropriate organizational stakeholders, improving operational readiness and creating opportunities for positive retention along with it. Furthermore, this research identifies opportunities and accompanying recommendations for actions the USN can take to generate more bottom-up innovation by analyzing synergy between intrapreneurial behaviors, the Department of Defense’s (DoD) Mission Command construct and other related doctrine. Lastly, a Prototype Knowledge Assessment Tool (PKAT) was developed to address JO professional capacity, institutional understanding, and subsequent applicability vulnerabilities.