Designing A System That The Intrapreneur Cannot Build Alone: Institutional Design for Non-Core Business Creation and the Corporate Relay Model

Abstract

Individual intrapreneurs occasionally succeed at non-core venture creation; organisations almost never succeed at replicating them. This paper addresses that structural gap. Building on an empirical single-case study in which one HQ manager at a major Japanese tourism corporation launched three non-travel ventures in a single fiscal year, it shifts the unit of analysis from the individual to the institution and asks: what design allows a large organisation to reproduce that performance at scale? Existing corporate entrepreneurship research identifies the cultural and structural antecedents of intrapreneurial activity but offers limited guidance on the mechanics of HQ-to-branch venture transfer — particularly the conditions under which transfer succeeds without hollowing out the ownership capacity of the receiving unit. The Over-Competence Trap, introduced in a companion study, names this failure mode: when HQ executes all the technically demanding work of incubation, the branch that inherits the venture can operate it as a procedure but cannot adapt it as an owner. This paper designs around that trap. The Corporate Relay Model (CRM) is proposed: a three-phase institutional framework comprising demand validation at branch level, HQ-led incubation with partial delegation, and staged branch ownership transfer across three defined sub-stages. From twelve individual-level success factors identified in the companion study and the informant's explicit scalability target — growth from three ventures per year to thirty — five design propositions are derived, governing validation protocol, talent selection, phased transfer, budget architecture, and HQ role differentiation. A workload analysis demonstrates that the current single-person model operates at or near its structural ceiling, and that full CRM implementation with a three-member HQ team could raise theoretical annual capacity to approximately eighteen ventures. The CRM contributes to ambidexterity theory by identifying staged ownership transfer as a structural mechanism for resolving the Over-Competence Trap, and to implementation science by demonstrating how individual-level success factors translate into replicable institutional design. The framework applies to any large organisation with a tiered HQ-branch structure and an existing customer relationship asset.