Intrapreneurship
One definition says that intrapreneurship is “the introduction and implementation of a significant innovation for the firm by one or more employees working within an established organisation”. It is the blossoming of the entrepreneurial spirit inside a large organisation. An intrapreneur is an intra-corporate entrepreneur, one who works as an employee of a corporation. Intrapreneurship offers large organisations the hope that they can remain entrepreneurial long after they have ceased to be run by entrepreneurs.
Small companies and large companies encourage intrapreneurs in different ways. In smaller companies, intrapreneurship has more to do with the informal relationships that build up between individuals within the firm; in larger companies it has to be systematically encouraged by formal procedures. It also has to be encouraged for a long time. In early 1999, The Economist said: “All big innovations need to be championed and nurtured for long periods, sometimes up to 25 years.” The International Management Centre’s website lists a few questions that employees should ask themselves if they want to know whether they are intrapreneurial or not.
- Do you get excited about what you are doing at work?
- Do you think about new business ideas while driving to work or taking a shower?
- Do you get into trouble from time to time for doing things which exceed your authority?
- Are you able to keep your ideas under cover, suppressing the urge to tell everybody about them until you have tested them and produced a plan for implementation?
- Have you successfully pushed through bleak times, when something on which you were working looked as if it might fail?
- Do you have more than your share of both fans and critics?
- Can you consider trying to overcome a natural perfectionist tendency to do all the work yourself and share responsibility for your ideas with a team?
- Would you be willing to give up some of your salary in exchange for the chance to try out your business idea, if the rewards for success were adequate? Anyone who answers Yes more often than No could (possibly) be an intrapreneur.