Defining intrapreneurship

Defining intrapreneurship
There are many definition of intrapreneurship. These definitions share a number of characteristics. For instance Jong and Wennekers (2008), indicates, intrapreneurs are proactive individuals with a strong desire for action. That mean the employees are ‘self-starters’ who do not have to be asked to take an initiative. In other work that employees, usually do not even ask for permission, and may ignore disapproval and other negative reactions from their environment about their ideas. These author indicates the proactive employees mean the employees or individual focussed on the search of an opportunity without regard to the resources they currently control. That mean intrapreneurs always seem to find a way. They also argued that intrapreneurs often pursue something that in some sense is ‘new’ or ‘innovative’, for instant employees that have an intrapreneurial behaviours and actions deviate from the status quo. From the definition that mention above we can derived three behaviour of intrapreneurs as state below:

1. Intrapreneurs are proactive individuals with a strong desire for action.
2. The proactive behaviour is focussed on the search of an opportunity without regard to the resources they currently control.
3. Intrapreneurs often pursue something that in some sense is ‘new’ or ‘innovative’

In table 1 this study give an overview of previously formulated definitions.
Table 2.1. Definitions of intrapreneurship
Vesper (1984: 295, in: Sharma & Chrisman, 1999)

Intrapreneurship is “employee initiative from below in the organization to undertake something new; an innovation which is created by subordinates without being asked, expected, or perhaps even given permission by higher management to do so”.

Pinchot (1985 in: Sharma & Chrisman, 1999) “Intrapreneurs are … ‘dreamers who do’; those who take hands-on responsibility for creating innovation of any kind within an organization; they may be the creators or inventors but are always the dreamers who figure out how to turn an idea into a profitable reality”.

Stevenson and Jarillo (1990)

Intrapreneurship refers to “a process by which individuals … inside organizations pursue opportunities independent of the resources they currently control”.

Antoncic and Hisrich (2003)
Intrapreneurship refers to “emergent behavioural intentions and behaviours that are related to departures from the customary ways of doing business in existing organizations”.


The detailed behavioural content of intrapreneurship is in its infancy. However, most of research at the organizational level verifies the characteristic dimensions of intrapreneurial behaviour as indicated in the above definitions while adding some more detail. Most of the previous study about the intrapreneurship were conduct at the organisational level. For instant, the study of Miller have made the classification of dimension corporate entrepreneurship or intrapreneurship namely proactiveness, innovativeness and risk taking in 1983. This efforts were continue by Covin and Slevin in 1986 and 1991. These author were expanded the concept of intrapreneurship but retained three characteristics of organizational level entrepreneurship: proactiveness, innovativeness and risk taking. These dimensions are often supposed to constitute a higher-level construct called entrepreneurial orientation. Similar dimensions are maintained in more recent classifications of organizational level entrepreneurship, for instant by another researcher e.g. Antoncic and Hisrich (2001). These author added one more dimension namely “new business venturing”. Thus they conclude that previous views of firm-level intrapreneurship can be classified into four dimensions: new business venturing, innovativeness, self-renewal and proactiveness. Knight (1997) also support a multidimensional concept but on the basis of empirical findings, he proposes to reduce Covin and Slevin’s (1986, 1991) categorization to two dimensions: innovativeness and proactiveness.

Based on the definitions by various author that study about the concept of intrapreneurship we can conclude that opportunity pursuit, resource acquisition, risk taking, proactiveness and innovativeness as key elements of entrepreneurial behaviour in existing organizations. There is a literature on each of these phenomena that mention above. The literature on early-stage entrepreneurial activity by new business founders has opportunity pursuit as a main focus and also pays attention to resource acquisition and risk taking. However, while conceptually quite relevant in many respects, this domain is exclusively focussed on individuals pursuing an opportunity outside existing organizations. As a consequence, specific contextual elements having to do with one's position as an employee inside an existing business are missing. These elements may be added by organizational behaviour studies that focus on employee behaviour inside existing organisations, and are known as respectively proactive behaviour and innovative work behaviour. In the next section this study will discuss the two focus of intrapreneurship namely intrapreneurial activities and intrapreneurial behaviour among employee on identifying relevant aspects for conceptualising and measuring this two concept.

By Al-Mansor Abu Said

Intrapreneurship: The spirit of intrapreneurial behaviour among employee

Intrapreneurship: The spirit of entrepreneurial behaviour among employee
According to Jong & Wennekers (2008), intrapreneurship is not the only label for entrepreneurship within the boundaries of organizations. A frequently used alternative term is corporate entrepreneurship (CE). Most of researchers have proposed and adopted so many of definitions of intrapreneurship. But they both terms were used to define entrepreneurial activities at the level of either organizations or individuals (employees). Sharma and Chrisman (1999) were differentiated the term of intrapreneurship and CE. They indicates that CE is usually defined at the level of organizations while intrapreneurship relates to the individual level. This definition consistence with view of another researcher namely Pinchot in his book titled “Intrapreneuring” (in year 1987) and Intrapreneuring in Action (in year 2000). Amo (2006) also proposes that corporate entrepreneurship is a top-down process, i.e. a strategy that management can utilize to foster more initiatives and/or improvement efforts from their workforce and organization. In contrast, intrapreneurship is bottom-up, related to proactive initiatives of individual employees to improve work procedures or products and/or to explore and exploit business opportunities.

The idea of intrapreneurship is clearly derived from the concept of independent entrepreneurship. There are too many definitions of entrepreneurship. But, one of the most popular definition came from Hisrich & Peter (2002) indicates that entrepreneurship, is ‘the process of creating something new with value by devoting the necessary time and effort, assuming the accompanying financial, psychic, and social risks, and receiving the resulting rewards of monetary and personal satisfaction and independence’. From this definition of entrepreneurship also seems more or less applicable to the concept of intrapreneurship, while taking account of the fact that intrapreneurs (employees) act within organizational boundaries and thus are less autonomous than independent entrepreneurs, gather fewer financial benefits of their entrepreneurial engagement and take fewer personel risks. But the difference is, the organization implies restrictions but also provides a considerable amount of security as the intrapreneur is not liable with his/her private means in case of failure.

What is Intrapreneurship? – Difference, Features and Examples of Intrapreneurs

Entrepreneurship is the practice of getting on a new business or reviving an existing business by pooling together a bunch of resources, in order to exploit new found opportunities.

What is Intrapreneurship?: Intrapreneurship is the practice of entrepreneurship by employees within an organization.

Difference between an entrepreneur and an intrapreneur:

An entrepreneur takes substantial risk in being the owner and operator of a business with expectations of financial profit and other rewards that the business may generate. On the contrary, an intrapreneur is an individual employed by an organization for remuneration, which is based on the financial success of the unit he is responsible for. Intrapreneurs share the same traits as entrepreneurs such as conviction, zeal and insight. As the intrapreneur continues to expresses his ideas vigorously, it will reveal the gap between the philosophy of the organization and the employee. If the organization supports him in pursuing his ideas, he succeeds. If not, he is likely to leave the organization and set up his own business.

Example of intrapreneurship: A classic case of intrapreneurs is that of the founders of Adobe, John Warnock and Charles Geschke. They both were employees of Xerox. As employees of Xerox, they were frustrated because their new product ideas were not encouraged. They QUIT Xerox in the early 1980s to begin their own business. Currently, Adobe has an annual turnover of over $3 billion.

Features of Intrapreneurship: Entrepreneurship involves innovation, the ability to take risk and creativity. An entrepreneur will be able to look at things in novel ways. He will have the capacity to take calculated risk and to accept failure as a learning point. An intrapreneur thinks like an entrepreneur looking out for opportunities, which profit the organization. Intrapreneurship is a novel way of making organizations more profitable where imaginative employees entertain entrepreneurial thoughts. It is in the interest of an organization to encourage intrapreneurs. Intrapreneurship is a significant method for companies to reinvent themselves and improve performance.

In a recent study, researchers compared the elements related to entrepreneurial and intrapreneurial activity. The study found that among the 32,000 subjects who participated in it, five percent were engaged in the initial stages of a business start-up, either on their own or within an organization. The study also found that human capital such as education and experience is connected more with entrepreneurship than with intrapreneurship. Another observation was that intraptreneurial startups were inclined to concentrate more on business-to-business products while entrepreneurial startups were inclined towards consumer sales.

Another important factor that led to the choice between entrepreneurship and intrapreneurship was age. The study found that people who launched their own companies were in their 30s and 40s. People from older and younger age groups were risk averse or felt they have no opportunities, which makes them the ideal candidates if an organization is on the look out for employees with new ideas that can be pursued.

Entrepreneurship appeals to people who possess natural traits that find start ups arousing their interest. Intrapreneurs appear to be those who generally would not like to get entangled in start ups but are tempted to do so for a number of reasons. Managers would do well to take employees who do not appear entrepreneurial but can turn out to be good intrapreneurial choices.

Examples of Intrapreneurs:

A lot of companies are known for their efforts towards nurturing their in-house talents to promote innovation. The prominent among them is “Skunk Works” group at Lockheed Martin. This group formed in 1943 to build P-80 fighter jets. Kelly Johnson was the director of the project, a person who gave “14 rules of intrapreneurship”.

At “3M” employees could spend their 15% time working on the projects they like for the betterment of the company. On the initial success of the project, 3M even funds it for further development.

Genesis Grant is another 3M intrapreneurial program which finances projects that might not end up getting funds through normal channels. Genesis Grant offers $85,000 to these innovators to carry forward their projects.

Robbie Bach, J Allard and team’s XBOX might not have been feasible without the Microsoft’s money and infrastructure. The project required 100s of millions and quality talent to make the product.

by: Al-Mansor Abu Said

Definition of Intrapreneurs

Some authors claim that low level employees (Burgelman, 1983b) and middle managers (Kanter, 1995) are especially well suited to notice possible opportunities, because of their closeness to operations and customers. If there is enough slack, or fungible resources, and impetus provided by venture “champions”10, the autonomous behavior may accumulate form and momentum enough for the starting of early stage experimentation and venture formation activities. Some initiatives then progress upward through the hierarchy, as the activities require more resources and consequently need approval from higher level managers. The development of a few initiatives continues until they are mature for acquiring top management authority. “Maturing” here signifies the gradual articulation and definition of the venture’s technical and economical aspects, as well as the development of a “master strategy” for the new area of business (Burgelman, 1983b: 235). The master strategy, therefore, plays the important role of relating venture definition to top management issues and explaining why it is needed. It therefore appears crucial for persuading top managers to select the venture initiative for full-scale pursuit.