Intrapreneurship is a form of entrepreneurship in which the entrepreneur is innovating within an existing company. Unlike in a startup company where the entrepreneur would raise funding from individuals often called angels or from venture capital firms, intrapreneurs would instead convince the company they are working for to execute on their idea and turn that into an intra-startup.
I had the opportunity to try both types of entrepreneurship, as a co-founder of EyeView I played the entrepreneur role while as the intra-founder of INTENTclick and it's Managing Director I get to play the intrapreneur role as INTENTclick is part of Kontera.
The one challange that people usually associate the most with being an intra-founder is internal politics. There is always a concern that somebody will steal your idea, take credit for it or try to use your success for his benefit. While entrepreneus don't normally have this problem, they do share the same concern that somebody will steal their ideas everytime they try to get feedback or pitch to someone. As explained in one of my former posts - asking to sign NDA - this approach will set you up for a failure. My observation is that there are a lot more good ideas than people who are willing to take the risk and execute on the ideas. The same thing applies to internal entreprenuership. If the idea is big enough to be a stand alone business, the real challange is on the execution. The long road from turning the idea into a reality will require the intra-founder to get as much feedback as he can and convince a lot of stake holders to support him so hiding the idea is not an option. At the same time, the exercise of getting the buy-in of all the stake holders ahead of time will attribute future success to the intrapreneur so no one will be able to steal it from him.
Another big difference I noticed is the organizational culture. With INTENTclick, the culture was partially inherited from Kontera with some influence from founding and management tream while with EyeView, the foudners had a much bigger role in setting the organizational culture. Note that not every corporate or company allows another organization to grow inside of it. As an intra-founder you need to consider what culture you want in your intra-startup and factor that in the decision to innovate from within a given company.
The other set of challanges with intrapreneurship that is somewhat unique is the constant need for the intra-founder to align it's small boat with the mother ship. Startup companies usually have to do that only after they get acquired by a bigger company and then the merger between the two companies is much sharper and causes the alignment to be quite drastic. In a way the intra-startup is constantly going through the experience of being purchased by the bigger company.
As intrapreneurship is less known, I see it as my mission to get the word out there and make the case for all intra-founders that are building great intra-startups. If you feel you are an intra-founder - you can join the linkedin group.
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