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