Intrapreneurship means behaving like an entrepreneur while working within a large organization. According to social scientist Joseph Schumpeter, introducing new technologies, increasing efficiency and productivity, and generating new products or services are all qualities characteristic of intrepreneurs.
Intrapreneurs and Corporate Management
Intrapreneurship is now known as the practice of a corporate management style that integrates risk-taking and innovation approaches. It also incorporates the reward and motivational techniques that are traditionally thought of as being the sole province of entrepreneurship.
The intrapreneur acts as an "inside entrepreneur" who focuses on innovation and creativity while operating within the goals and environment of an organization. Intrapreneurs bring their ideas to the firm to generate new products, processes, or services and thereby act as a force for change within the organization. Capturing a little of the dynamic nature of entrepreneurial management (trying things until successful, learning from failures, attempting to conserve resources, and so on) adds to the innovation potential of an otherwise static organization without exposing those employees to the risks or accountability normally associated with entrepreneurship.
Theory and Practice
Incorporating entrepreneurial concepts into traditional corporate environments is easy to promote in theory: capturing the innovative attitudes of small start-ups within the larger organizational context (i.e., with more resources) seems intuitive. In reality, entrepreneurship is often much easier to discuss in a classroom than to integrate into an actual organization. There are many reasons for this that generally boil down to simple issues of size and corporate inertia.
Companies are built on structures and hierarchies which in turn create a dependable and repeatable operational process. This process leads to value creation, and efficiency is always a focal point in operational contexts. When innovation and intrepreneurship enters this equation they are often seen as costs without tangible and definite benefits, and as lacking consistency and applicability to the current model. In many ways, the benefits of intrepreneurship are difficult to forecast and thus difficult to justify. As a result, good managers must be long-term oriented and open-minded in order to capture the benefits of instilling an intrepreneurial spirit.