Intrapreneurship

Intrapreneurship is the act of behaving like an entrepreneur while working within a large organization. Intrapreneurship is known as the practice of a corporate management style that integrates risk-taking and innovation approaches, as well as the reward and motivational techniques, that are more traditionally thought of as being the province of entrepreneurship.

Pinchot (1984) defined intrapreneurs as "dreamers who do. Those who take hands-on responsibility for creating innovation of any kind, within a business". In 1992, The American Heritage Dictionary acknowledged the popular use of a new word, intrapreneur, to mean "A person within a large corporation who takes direct responsibility for turning an idea into a profitable finished product through assertive risk-taking and innovation". Koch (2014) goes further, claiming that intrapreneurs are the "secret weapon" of the business world. Based on these definitions, being an intrapreneur is considered to be beneficial for both intrapreneurs and large organisations. Companies support intrapreneurs with finance and access to corporate resources, while intrapreneurs create innovation for companies.

The intrapreneur is not to be confused with the "innerpreneur", a person who aims at personal fulfilment more than at economic gains when creating a business.

The first written use of the terms ‘intrapreneur’, ‘intrapreneuring,’ and ‘intrapreneurship’ date from a paper written in 1978 by Gifford Pinchot III and Elizabeth Pinchot. Later the term was credited to Gifford Pinchot III by Norman Macrae in the April 17, 1982 issue of The Economist. The first formal academic case study of corporate entrepreneurship or intrapreneurship was published in June 1982, as a Master's in Management thesis, by Howard Edward Haller, on the intrapreneurial creation of PR1ME Leasing within PR1ME Computer Inc. (from 1977 to 1981). This academic research was later published as a case study by VDM Verlag as Intrapreneurship Success:A PR1ME Example. The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language included the term 'intrapreneur' in its 3rd 1992 Edition, and also credited Pinchot as the originator of the concept. The term "intrapreneurship" was used in the popular media first in February 1985 by TIME magazine article "Here come the Intrapreneurs" and then the same year in another major popular publication was in a quote by Steve Jobs, Apple Computer’s Chairman, in an interview in the September 1985 Newsweek article, which quotes him as saying, "The Macintosh team was what is commonly known as intrapreneurship;only a few years before the term was coined—a group of people going, in essence, back to the garage, but in a large company."

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