Entrepreneurship and the Human Capital of Organizational Innovation: The Intrapreneur

Abstract

Whilst Vora et al. (2012) suggest that studies of entrepreneurship have been prolific since their origins in the 1930s, it is not until relatively recently in academic and business literature that we find the expression intrapreneur documented. Two names are commonly linked to its first usage: Gifford Pinchot III and Norman Macrae. The term was credited to Pinchot by Macrae in 1982. Bouchard and Basso (2011), Franco and Haase (2009), and Kneale (2011), among other authors also attribute Pinchot as the primary source of intrapreneurship to describe entrepreneurship inside the corporation, and that intrapreneurs will act as champions for new ideas progressing from inception to actuality. The infamous quote found in most references to Pinchot’s writings is that “intrapreneurs are dreamers who do” Cottam (1989: 522). Pinchot (1985) explains, “The intrapreneur may be the creator or inventor but it is always the dreamer who figures out how to turn and idea into a profitable reality” (p ix). Other widely used terms are internal entrepreneur, administrative entrepreneur (Gundogdu 2012: 298), intra-corporate entrepreneur (Antoncic and Hisrich 2004: 520), and corporate entrepreneur, the latter being attributed to the work of Drucker (1994). Kenney (2010) introduces an advanced term, globalpreneurship, to define the process of intrapreneurship in large multinational companies, introducing a further employee profile of globalpreneurs, capturing the specific challenges for intrapreneurship in corporate environments where stakeholder and stockholder requirements put considerable external pressures on operational performance metrics.