Enterprise and Small Business Principles
Defining intrapreneurship
As the previous chapters in this book have already demonstrated, there are a number of definitions of entrepreneurship. However, these tend to describe the activities of the owner-manager within a small organisation. With an increasing number of managers and professionals setting up new and small businesses within old and existing organisations during the 1970s, the term ‘intrapreneur’ was invented to describe those individuals who operated as entrepreneurs within existing organisations (Macrae, 1976).
During the 1980s, when entrepreneurs were again in favour, the concept was developed further to describe entrepreneurial behaviour within large organisations, rather than the establishment of small businesses within larger organisations. As Pinchot (1986) states: ‘When I look at successful innovation in companies as diverse as Hewlett Packard, General Motors, Bank of California, 3M, General Mills, Du Pont or AT&T, I always find small independent groups of imaginative action takers working to circumvent or even sabotage the formal systems that supposedly manage innovation. These courageous souls form underground teams and networks that routinely bootleg company resources or “steal” company time to work on their own missions. They make new things happen while those trying to innovate by the official route are still waiting for permission to begin.’ However, more recent work has also suggested that there is no reason why intrapreneurship cannot be initiated by employees working within established small firms (Carrier, 1996).
So what makes intrapreneurs different from entrepreneurs? Like entrepreneurs, intrapreneurs take personal risks to make new ideas and innovation happen. However, unlike entrepreneurship, where the time and capital of the entrepreneur are placed at risk, intrapreneurship will often take the large organisation into new products and markets, away from their established core businesses. This may risk the company’s capital, credibility and market-share, and in so doing the intrapreneur’s position within the company. Therefore, an intrapreneur is an employee of a large organisation who has the entrepreneurial qualities of drive, creativity, vision and ambition, but who prefers, if possible, to remain within the security of an established company (Gibb, 1988). A more detailed definition will be discussed later in this chapter.
As with entrepreneurship, the term ‘intrapreneurship’ has been used to describe a number of different organisational scenarios (Dess et al., 2003; Coulson-Thomas, 1999; Gibb, 1990; Pearson, 1989; Knight, 1987), including:
■ the development of an overall climate of entrepreneurship at a corporate level (Antoncic and Hisrich, 2003; Stopford and Baden-Fuller, 1994);
■ intra-corporate venturing - the creation of new ventures within an existing organisation to stimulate or develop new products or product improvements, including autonomous business units established within the corporation to develop a new product and/or market (Block and MacMillan, 1993; Gee, 1994; David, 1993); venture groups or divisions set up for the cultivation of new ventures (Ginsberg and Hays, 1994) and independent spin-offs (Jones-Evans and Klofsten, 1997);
■ initiatives by employees in the organisation to undertake something new, where an innovation is often created by subordinates without being asked, expected or even being given permission by higher management (Brazeal, 1996);
■ rationalisation of the business, including management personnel (Fulop, 1991).
