Hustle Intrapreneurship Accelerator
Turning conference inspiration into action inside your organization
Concept
Hustle is designed to expose participants to new ideas, emerging trends, innovative organizations, and people doing interesting work. The Hustle Intrapreneurship Accelerator adds a layer of applied learning around that experience.
The premise is simple:
Prepare → Experience → Apply
Participants prepare for Hustle by understanding how they approach entrepreneurial thinking and why innovation can be particularly difficult inside established organizations. They then attend Hustle with a specific opportunity and research mission in mind. After the conference, they reconvene to translate what they learned into a practical 30-day experiment inside their organization.
The objective is not simply to leave participants inspired by innovation. It is to help them practice intrapreneurship.
1. PREPARE: Pre-Conference Workshop
Wednesday, 9/23
4:00pm - 6:00 p.m.
Heider College of Business
Objective
Help participants understand why good organizations struggle to innovate, examine their own entrepreneurial tendencies, and identify an opportunity they want to explore during Hustle.
Pre-Work: Pre-Flight Check
Before the workshop, participants complete the Greisch Center's Pre-Flight Check, an assessment designed to help teams understand how they approach entrepreneurial thinking, uncertainty, evidence, and action.
Participants arrive with their individual/team report in hand.
The workshop begins by asking them to examine that report through a new lens:
What happens when our entrepreneurial tendencies collide with the operating system of an established organization?
The Innovator's Dilemma
Using Clayton Christensen's The Innovator's Dilemma as a conceptual backbone, participants explore an important paradox of corporate innovation:
Successful organizations can struggle to innovate precisely because they are well-managed.
Established organizations develop processes, incentives, resource-allocation systems, customer expectations, and performance metrics for good reasons. Those systems make the existing organization work.
They can also make experimentation difficult.
Participants explore the organizational forces that can resist innovation—including incentives, hierarchy, budgeting, existing customers, risk management, established processes, and organizational “antibodies”—without assuming those forces are inherently bad.
The intrapreneur's challenge is learning how to navigate that system.
The Collision Exercise
Participants compare what their Pre-Flight Check tells them about themselves or their team with how their organization operates.
They consider questions such as:
Where are we comfortable operating with uncertainty?
Where does our organization demand certainty?
How do we learn and make decisions?
What behaviors does our organization reward?
How quickly can we act?
Where are entrepreneurial behaviors likely to encounter organizational resistance?
The goal is to identify the friction between entrepreneurial thinking and organizational reality.
Identify an Opportunity
Each participant then identifies one meaningful opportunity inside their organization: an unmet customer need, internal pain point, inefficiency, emerging technology, new market, process improvement, or other possibility worth exploring.
Rather than immediately developing a solution, participants distinguish between:
What do we KNOW? and What do we ASSUME?
They leave the workshop with questions—not answers.
2. EXPERIENCE: Hustle Conference
September 30
Participants attend Hustle not simply as conference attendees, but as researchers.
Each participant brings a personal Hustle Mission connected to the opportunity identified during the pre-conference workshop.
Throughout the conference, they actively hunt for:
Evidence. Examples. Ideas. People. Questions.
Speakers, conversations, technologies, business models, and other conference experiences become inputs into their exploration.
Participants capture observations in simple Hustle Field Notes:
The opportunity I'm exploring:
What I currently believe.
What I don't know.
The organizational constraint I'm most concerned about.
What I discovered at Hustle.
What challenged my assumptions.
This turns the conference itself into part of the learning experience.
3. APPLY: Post-Conference Action Workshop
Wednesday, 10/7
4:00pm - 6:00 p.m.
Heider College of Business
Objective
Turn conference learning into a small, practical action inside the participant's organization.
Participants return to the opportunity and assumptions they identified before Hustle and compare them against what they discovered during the conference.
The workshop moves through three questions:
What did you notice?
What changed your thinking?
What are you going to test?
Rather than creating a business plan, pitch deck, or large innovation initiative, each participant develops a 30-Day Intrapreneurship Experiment
Participants identify the most important assumption associated with their opportunity and design a small experiment capable of producing additional evidence.
The experiment defines:
What we believe
Why we believe it
The assumption we most need to test
What we can do within the next 30 days
Who needs to be involved
What organizational barriers or “antibodies” we need to anticipate
What evidence we will collect
What would cause us to continue, change direction, or stop
Participants leave with a concrete next action rather than simply a collection of conference notes and ideas.
The Experience
The Accelerator creates a simple progression:
PREPARE
Understand yourself. Understand the system. Identify an opportunity.
EXPERIENCE
Explore. Collect evidence. Challenge assumptions.
APPLY
Synthesize what you learned. Design an experiment. Take action.
The Hustle: Intrapreneurship Accelerator is being developed and facilitated by the Greisch Center for Enterprise Value at Creighton University's Heider College of Business, in collaboration with CPCE.
It also provides participants with an introduction to the Greisch Center's emerging work in applied entrepreneurship, entrepreneurial thinking, corporate innovation, and intrapreneurship.
The desired outcome is straightforward:
Don't just attend an innovation conference. Put innovation to work.
PREPARE — Pre-Conference Workshop | 2 Hours
Welcome + The Intrapreneur's Challenge — Why innovation inside an established organization is different
Your Pre-Flight Check — Review results through an intrapreneurship lens
The Innovator's Dilemma — Why successful organizations struggle with innovation
The Collision Exercise — Where entrepreneurial thinking meets organizational systems, incentives, and antibodies
Choose Your Opportunity + Hustle Mission — Identify what you know, what you assume, and what you're hunting for at Hustle
APPLY — Post-Conference Action Workshop | 2 Hours
Hustle Debrief — What did you notice? What surprised you?
Revisit the Opportunity — What evidence did you collect and what changed your thinking?
Find the Riskiest Assumption — What do you most need to learn before moving forward?
Design the 30-Day Experiment — Build a small, practical test inside your organization
Navigate + Commit — Anticipate organizational barriers, identify stakeholders, and define the first action