MIT professor Eric von Hippel justifies intrapreneurship like this: Imagine you’re a mechanical watchmaker. The mere fact that you’re in a big company means that you can’t be an entrepreneur you’ve decided you don’t want to be an entrepreneur.’ I know there’s a lot of obstacles to being an entrepreneur in a big organization, but we can’t accept that just because it’s hard it can’t be done.” Why you should care “I think the word has been around for a while,” Aulet said. Stanford University professor Robert Burgelman has written on the topic multiple times in the last 30 years, as has MIT Sloan’s Edward Roberts. In 1978, Gifford Pinchot III and Elizabeth Pinchot used the word in their paper “ Intra-Corporate Entrepreneurship,” and again in their 1985 book “Intrapreneuring.” The history of the term “intrapreneurship” remains a debate. Many of the same criteria that we would use to evaluate a new venture by an entrepreneur is really the same.” “You need to think about how big is the market, how many resources do they need to create something, what could the payoff be. “They’re creating something that hasn’t been done before or done quite the same way,” Cusumano said. They’re not building something entirely from scratch, nor are they risking their own money.

Unlike entrepreneurs, intrapreneurs work with an existing company’s resources, said MIT Sloan professor Michael Cusumano, an expert in strategy, product development, and entrepreneurship. So entrepreneurs can exist in corporations, and corporations need them more and more.” “We believe that entrepreneurship is a way of creating value with new products, new ways of running businesses, and with a number of assets that you control.

“A lot of times people believe that entrepreneurship is strictly associated with startups that’s not how we look at it,” Aulet said. And some of the military’s most well-known aircraft were engineered at Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works.Įntrepreneurship doesn’t equal “small,” it equals value creation, said Bill Aulet, managing director of the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship. Sometimes that business becomes a new section, or department, or even a subsidiary spinoff.Ĭhances are there’s a handy example of intrapreneurship stuck to your desk: the Post-it note.Īlso likely on - or accessible - at your desk is Gmail, which grew out of Google’s ' 20% time,' while the Facebook “like” button was built during one of the company’s hackathons. It’s creating a new business or venture within an organization. Intrapreneurship is acting like an entrepreneur within an established company. Open share links close share links What is intrapreneurship

Venture synonym business