Intrapreneurship everywhere

Wherever we find innovation in large organizations we find intrapreneurs making it happen. Every innovation, large or small, requires some courage, some vision, and a willingness to take charge and make it happen. The tireless persistence and practical imagination of the intrapreneur are essential to the success of any new idea.

Even the little everyday innovations that keep a company responsive to customers begin with a vision of how to serve customers better or more cost-effectively. They grow out of a small dream and require significant initiative and courage to carry through. Even the most minor innovation thus represents a small intrapreneurial act.

Intrapreneurs naturally arise because they are passionate about making some idea a commercial reality. But though intrapreneuring is almost everywhere, so are management practices that make it more difficult. In this book, we will show how to radically increase the rate of innovation—without increasing the financial resources devoted to it. We will show how to bring out, focus, and guide the organization’s intrapreneurial energy without frustrating its intrapreneurs.

Source: by Gifford Pinchot and Ron Pellman (Intrapreneuring in Action: A Handbook for Business Innovation)

Innovation of human capital

For more than half a century, research and development (R&D) has been closely associated with technological innovation (Miller & Morris, 1999). Invention is the narrowest definition of innovation. Drucker (1994) maintained that there are seven basic sources of opportunities to innovate. Only one of them refers to inventing something new. Innovation is thus more than invention and does not have to be technical. There are, for instance, numerous examples of social and economic innovations (Drucker, 1994). Innovation is a proposed theory or design concept that synthesizes extant knowledge and techniques to provide a theoretical basis for a new concept (Bright, 1969; Sundbo, 1998). Innovation thus has many facets and is multi-dimensional.

The most prominent innovation dimensions can be expressed as dualisms—(1) radical vs. incremental; (2) product vs. process and (3) administrative vs. technological (Cooper, 1998). Innovation can be radical and incremental. Radical innovations refer to path-breaking, discontinuous, revolutionary, original, pioneering, basic or major innovations (Green, Gavin, & Aiman-Smith, 1995). Incremental innovations are small improvements made to enhance and extend the established processes, products and services. However, this contradistinction does not "necessarily [correspond] to the more fine-tuned reality" because "radicality is a continuum" (Katila, 2002, p. 307). Product innovation, as the name suggests, "reflects change in the end product or service offered by the organizations, [whereas] process innovation represents changes in the way firms produce end products or services" (Utterback cited in Cooper, 1998, p. 498). Some researchers have categorized innovation as either technological or administrative. Technological innovation refers to "the adoption of a new idea that directly influences the basic output processes", whereas administrative innovations "include changes that affect the policies, allocation of resources, and other factors associated with the social structure of the organization" (Daft, 1978 cited in Cooper, 1998, p. 497).

For the purpose of the present study, innovation is defined broadly to include new products, new processes, new services (including new uses of established products, processes and services), new forms of organization, new markets and the development of new skills and human capital.

Source: by Fang Zhao (Maximum business profit through E-Partnership)

Intrapreneurship construct

Drucker (1994) made an important contribution to the theoretical construct of entrepreneurship in large organizations when he referred to "corporate entrepreneurship" or "intrapreneurship". In the present study, entrepreneurship includes corporate entrepreneurship and intrapreneurship. Corporate entrepreneurship can be used to improve competitive positioning and transform corporations, their markets and industries, as opportunities for value-creating innovations are developed and exploited (Lumpkin & Dess, 1996; Miller, 1983; Naman & Slevin, 1993). Antoncic and Hisrich (2003) argued that intrapreneurship goes on within organizations, regardless of their size. Intrapreneurship research has studied the individual intrapreneur, the formation of new corporate ventures and the characteristics of entrepreneurial organization (Antoncic & Hisrich, 2003). There is a firmly established empirical base for claiming the effectiveness of corporate entrepreneurship (Lumpkin & Dess, 1996; Zahra & Covin, 1995). Corporate entrepreneurship rejuvenates and reengineers corporate growth through innovations in various forms.

Source: Maximum business profit through E-Partnership