When we launched Intrapreneurship Academy (IA) in 2018, we were responding to a need in the connectivity industry. Through focus groups and conversations with the next generation of leaders, we kept hearing the same challenge: talented professionals wanted to be entrepreneurial within their organizations but needed the right guardrails to channel their creativity and disruption in ways that were safe, strategic, and sustainable for large organizations.
They needed more than permission to think differently. They needed skills, frameworks, and confidence to drive change while maintaining organizational support. That insight became the foundation of Intrapreneurship Academy—a natural evolution of Syndeo Institute’s 40-year mission to steward the history and legacy of our industry through education.
Our journey began with an in-person model where participants would come to Denver for kickoff and capstone sessions, with virtual classes in between. Then COVID-19 changed everything. Like many organizations, we pivoted to 100% virtual delivery, and what we discovered surprised us: the world got comfortable with virtual learning, and it opened doors we hadn’t anticipated.
Today, we maintain that global, blended virtual cohort model that brings together professionals from across the world. But we’ve evolved far beyond our original eight-week format. We now offer our program in three-week sessions with breaks in between, allowing participants to absorb and apply their learning without the pressure of being locked into continuous coursework. This flexibility matters because it respects the reality of demanding leadership roles while maintaining the depth and rigor that creates real transformation.
Perhaps the biggest evolution has been in how we deliver our content. A couple of years ago, we recognized that one size doesn’t fit all. While our traditional cohort model remains powerful and essential for many of our partners, organizations have different needs at different levels.
That’s why we expanded our offerings to include masterclasses and webinars that allow us to customize content collaboratively with partners. Instead of asking, “Would you like to take this course?” we now ask, “What are you trying to accomplish this year?” We work backward to identify and align our curriculum with their organizational goals, leadership themes, and operational objectives.
The results have been remarkable. We’re now delivering content that ranges from full-day deep dives on specific topics to one-hour lunch-and-learns that help teams quickly learn new concepts and language. This approach creates scale within organizations in a way we couldn’t achieve before. Instead of one person returning from a course with newfound knowledge and no shared vocabulary, we’re now embedding concepts across leadership levels, creating a common language for innovation and change.
Jeff English, Senior Director of Technical Operations for Comcast, experienced this firsthand when he completed our Finding Opportunity in Change courses this past spring. He told us: “It was really great because sometimes we’re in a vacuum in our own organizations. Having people from different parts of other businesses and companies and hearing what they’re going through lets us see the similarities we all share, while allowing us to hear different perspectives.”
Our curriculum has never been static. We continuously update existing content and add new courses based on what we’re hearing from our partners about their most pressing challenges.
It all started with Driving Innovation, a course that teaches mid-level leaders how to take an idea from concept to greenlight within their organizations. Participants learn to identify internal executive advocates, build budgets, craft messaging, and test and validate concepts. We’ve seen these projects make real impact by generating tens of millions of dollars in revenue or significant improvements in customer experience.
When the pandemic hit, we introduced Leading with Agility at precisely the moment organizations needed it most. Leaders were suddenly managing virtual teams, delivering customer experience remotely, and solving IT challenges across state lines. The course taught professionals how to turn unexpected challenges into opportunities. It wasn’t just making lemonade from lemons; it was building an online lemonade business.
Our most recent addition, Intrapreneurial Leadership, focuses on what we call “power skills”. These are the critical capabilities rarely taught in business school but instead learned through trial and error in organizational life. This course addresses emotional intelligence, understanding organizational dynamics, navigating political environments, and developing self-awareness about how you’re perceived.
When I asked Jeff about how the courses changed his approach, he explained, “I think in the past I might have just accepted that something was going to happen, and that we’d all have to get on board and move forward. Now it’s about, saying, okay, what questions do we need to ask, and how do we bring everybody along? Some people are ready for the big changes, while others wish we could go back. This teaches us how to work with everyone, including how to lead those who might be resistant to change.”
One reason we’ve maintained our blended cohort model alongside customized delivery is the unique value it provides. When participants learn alongside their peers from other companies, something powerful happens. They gain freedom to be vulnerable and candid in ways that aren’t always possible in company-only training environments. They discover that challenges they thought were unique to their organization are shared across the industry. And they build networks that extend far beyond the course itself. To back this up, Jeff told me that the small class size allowed for a lot of dialogue and interaction, giving everyone equal voices and that the conversations allowed the group to do deeper dives into common issues.
This intimate learning environment, whether virtual or in-person, creates space for the kind of transformational thinking that doesn’t happen in large-scale webinars or pre-recorded training modules.
As we plan for the year ahead, we’re not working in isolation. We’re spending significant time with our partners, understanding their three-to-five-year goals, their leadership needs, and the capabilities they need to build. This collaborative approach ensures our curriculum development is grounded in real organizational challenges, not academic theory.
One major focus for 2026 is our continued global expansion. We’ve spent the past two years establishing our presence internationally, attending key shows, presenting at conferences, building thought leadership, and developing partnerships. We’re forming relationships with European organizations and associations. What we’re hearing from international partners is fascinating: there’s real appetite for the American approach to business. It’s the willingness to bootstrap, fail fast, and take risks without fear of looking foolish. We’re finding ways to inject that mindset while respecting cultural differences and adapting our content to meet regional needs.
We’re also leaning further into our masterclass model, which has proven to be the most effective way to create organizational scale. Instead of training one person at a time, we’re now working with partners to deliver different levels of content to different audiences. We offer deep nine-week experiences for emerging leaders who become internal resources, intensive masterclasses for senior directors and above who need to lead through concepts, and webinars that socialize the language across entire teams.
While we don’t always have access to comprehensive data about long-term career outcomes, the stories we do hear energize everything we do. We hear about participants getting promoted or moving into roles they’d always wanted but didn’t feel qualified for. We hear about professionals—particularly women—who gained the confidence to raise their hand for opportunities they would have previously let pass by.
The pride participants take when their innovation projects get adopted by their organizations and generate measurable impact is extraordinary. The visibility these projects create often accelerates careers in ways participants didn’t anticipate.
At its core, Intrapreneurship Academy exists because we believe in the power of individuals to drive change within large organizations. We believe the connectivity industry needs leaders who can think entrepreneurially while understanding organizational realities. We believe in teaching frameworks and skills that provide guardrails for innovation, so that creative thinking doesn’t happen in spite of organizational structure but because of how leaders learn to navigate it.
Our industry is facing unprecedented change—from AI integration to evolving customer expectations to new competitive landscapes. The leaders who will thrive aren’t just those who can execute today’s playbook. They’re the ones who can write tomorrow’s playbook while delivering today’s results, who can move across organizational boundaries with emotional intelligence and strategic thinking, and who can bring their teams along through constant change.
That’s the leader we’re developing at Intrapreneurship Academy. That’s the journey we’ve been on since 2018, and it’s the journey we’re excited to continue in 2026 and beyond.
Interested in learning more about our offerings for your organization? Visit Intrapreneurship Academy to explore how we can help develop your next generation of leaders.
