What Is an Intrapreneur?

Entrepreneurial vs. intrapreneurial thought: Outside the box; within the business

If you’re thinking about going to business school, odds are you’re familiar with the path of the entrepreneur and how many MBAs unlock the good life by launching their own startups. Maybe you even want to be a famous entrepreneur yourself, and, really, who could blame you? But don’t forget about the career path of the intrapreneur—a role that is gaining widespread attention in the business world.

Read on while we explore the differences between the contemporary entrepreneur and the uber-contemporary (trailblazing, really) intrapreneur.

What is an entrepreneur?

The fanfare surrounding the startup—and the successful entrepreneur at the startup’s center—has dominated the conversation in the business world for decades, partly due to self-starting magnates like Richard Branson, techies like Steve Jobs, young execs like Mark Zuckerberg, and real estate giants like Barbara Corcoran and her fellow Shark Tank tycoons.

In the business world, the startup represents the hip “it” thing, the household name, the approachable guy at the party who showed up wearing Ralph Lauren but brought plenty of beer.

In the public eye, famous entrepreneurs such as those mentioned above create “the most exciting trends” in the business world, according to Steve Hasker, the Nielsen Company’s President of Global Media Products and Advertiser Solutions. They “amass great wealth and transform the way we live our lives”—a pursuit that any business school grad could get into.

But the story doesn’t end there. As Hasker points out, the world of business management is not binary, with entrepreneurial self-sufficiency at one end and executive servitude at the other.

“Within corporations, there’s an equally important skill-set required, and that’s the ‘intrapreneur’: a term that’s starting to gain some popularity,” Hasker says. So, what is an intrapreneur?

A concept coined in 1978 by management consultants Gifford and Elizabeth Pinchot, the intrapreneur applies the innovation and development generally attributed to the entrepreneur within an existing corporation.

According to growth consultant Andy Birol, the intrapreneur “will buck the corporate malaise, risk his or her career to get things done, and is willing to ‘do the right thing to serve the customer.’” When things need to be shaken up and risks have to be taken, he or she has the freedom to change the game and implement entrepreneurial principles while working in-house, with in-house resources, at a large organization or firm.

Should you be an intrapreneur?

In terms of ideas, this means that the same skill-sets are valued in intrapreneurs as in entrepreneurs, but the focus is different.

“They need to either take an existing idea or develop a new one, and then—equally importantly through all of the obstacles that invariably exist, many of which can be larger in a large corporation than out in the startup world—they drive it forward,” says Hasker.

In terms of execution, the intrapreneur needs to think like a founding member of the corporation, down to the ability to not “take no for an answer,” he says. “They enlist other people to the idea. They get support. They get ideas and they further develop the idea. They give other people credit and they move the process along.”

4 ideal characteristics of intrapreneurs in the business world

Forbes contributor David K. Williams, who also believes that intrapreneurs should “think and behave like owners,” further elaborates on some of the intrinsic motivations that make for a high-quality intrapreneur:

Making money is not an intrapreneur’s driving force: Personal economic advancement is not the point; the point is advancing the organization, as an owner would.
Intrapreneurs are “greenhousers”: They let ideas germinate and grow, keeping an open mind and finding ways over time to make these ideas work.
Intrapreneurs are not afraid to change course, or even to fail: Above all, good intrapreneurs are risk-takers who know that failure is often just a step on the road to success.
Intrapreneurs have integrity: “A budding businessperson could carry every other characteristic in spades, but without a foundation of integrity, they will fail (and the work landscape is littered with many examples of such failures),” says Williams.

In the contemporary business world, there is a growing place for the intrapreneur, Hasker says. “I think you’ll see the most successful companies harness those kind of people, really value them, cherish them, and develop them going forward.”

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