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.