Intrapreneurship

What is intrapreneurship

Intrapreneur is an employee entrepreneur.

An intrapreneur is someone who performs entrepreneurial activity inside and for the organization. He/she successfully navigates the internal and external constraints, to develop ideas into profitable, scalable realities.

Intrapreneurs are not building something entirely from scratch (mostly), nor are they risking their own money.

“They’re creating something that hasn’t been done before or done quite the same way,” MIT Sloan professor Michael Cusumano

Intrapreneurship is the act of behaving like an entrepreneur while working within a large organization.

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Intrapreneurship Examples

Some of the better known examples of intrapreneurship are:

Post it notes, Gmail, Google Maps, facebook like button

Some of the lesser know ones are :

How a city – Surat that had plague in 1994, soon became of the cleanest cities, due intrapreneurship of an IAS office Mr S R Rao. Further here

How Titan edge - the slimmest watch, was born due to intrapreneurship of Xeres Desai the then MD of Titan and the team. Further here

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Why intrapreneurship

“Intrapreneur/ship” as a word arguably got coined in 1978 but is less known than “entrepreneur/ship”. The reason perhaps is that we celebrate entrepreneurship a lot more than intrapreneurship.

Intrapreneurs are the life blood of any organization’s innovation culture and successes. These the primary status quo challengers. Intrapreneurs successfully enroll people to their cause and take people along with them to innovate.

Behind every successful entrepreneur, there are many intrapreneurs.

Steve Jobs had the vision, he didn’t really solve all the problems, they were solved by intrapreneurs who bought into the organization’s vision and fought through internal and external constraints to deliver a scalable, innovative product.

The companies feted to be the most successful and innovative companies – 3M, Google, Apple, Amazon, Facebook & Sony – all have fantastic intrapreneurs taking the organization further on the innovation pyramid.

Why should employees become intrapreneurs?

First, if you can't take the risk of quitting your job, putting your financial security at risk to be an entrepreneur, then intrapreneurship offers an avenue to experience and feel the thrill.

Second, intrapreneurs grow faster than others, in their fields of choice. If one goes about with high energy trying to enroll to people to the cause, negotiating their way to resistance, creatively solving problems, and executing projects well, they are bound to grow, aint it?

Intrapreneurial skills and traits

Supported by a conducive organizational culture, Intrapreneurs think, behave, and execute differently.

Think: Intrapreneurs are creative thinkers, big dreamer and are adept at finding opportunities

Behave: They would score high emotional intelligence, resilience in face of adversity and empowerment of teams.

Execute: They can enroll people to a vision, manage an idea implementation with discipline and solving problems along the way.

Of course, they produce Results, in terms of implemented ideas, that help organizations achieve their vision

Measure intrapreneurship score

Measure your intrapreneurship score on think, behave, execute and the results that you have produced. Find areas you may be good at and areas that need work to achieve better results.

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