Entrepreneurship has always been one of my favourite subjects within business studying because I desires to create new things and to improve my world. During the lecture from last week, I was introduced to this new term “intrapreneurship,” defined as “the act of behaving like an entrepreneur while working within a large organization.” Since it is closely connected to entrepreneurship, I decided to explore it further by reading some blogs that relates to this concept.

The blog “Intrapreneurship: A Win-Win Situation” by Shana Labrecque lists all the strengths of intrapreneurship from both the entrepreneur’s perspective and the company’s perspective. I found the post very helpful and easy to understand because it includes a very detailed mind map that correlates individual workers and the whole company.

From these information that Shana provides, I found a few main difference between entrepreneurship and intrapreneurship. For instance, an intrapreneur uses the company’s resource to initiate and develop their projects that usually aim to change or renew an existing system. Therefore, all the risks are taken by the company whereas for an entrepreneurship, it is the other way around. However, if an intrapreneurship is successful, it can potentially bring huge benefits to the company such as differentiating the company from its competitors, optimizing the company’s resources and capturing new market growth.

Although the term entrepreneurship appears more often in our lives, intrapreneurship has also changed our world significantly. Many of us might not know that Gmail, one of the most essential applications in our daily lives today, is a product of intrapreneurship. Paul Buchheit, the creator of Gmail was able to work on his project from 2001 to 2004 because Google allows its employees to spend 20% of their work days to develop new ideas and projects. When Gmail came out, “it was the first email with a successful search feature and the option to keep all of your email instead of frantically deleting to stay under your limit.”

Google’s trust and support for its employees is the key reason why they can stay at the top of its industry for so many years. After reading Shana’s blog and incorporate it with a real example, I found that intrapreneurship and entrepreneurship have very different meanings for different businesses and are equally important. It is obvious that a successful entrepreneurship brings the individual more benefits. But in my opinion, an intrapreneurship is much more likely to succeed because you have the numerous amount of support from both your company and your colleagues. Therefore, depending on each individual’s own situation, the person can choose between these two approaches in order to practice, develop their ideas and ultimately improve the world we are living in today.

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1. https://www.vocoli.com/blog/may-2014/10-inspiring-examples-of-successful-intrapreneurship/
2. https://intrapreneurialinitiative.org/intrapreneurship-a-win-win-situation/
3. http://logos.wikia.com/wiki/Gmail

If you are not an art enthusiast or professional artist, painting is typically seen as a time consuming activity enjoyed by kids. Because as an adult, even if someone wants to relax himself by doing some fun activities, playing some sports or going to the bar would be seen as more efficient options than sitting in front of a piece of paper. Nonetheless, this stereotypical view is broken by the trendy “paint-and-sip” class. This creative business model is fairly easy to understand because just like the name stated, it is essentially a mixture between art and alcohol, each person pay roughly about $35 to $65 to study how to paint and drink their favourite beverage at the same time.

This little twist might sounds very simple, but the idea has gained numerous amount of popularity with  “an estimated 1000 wine and painting party companies in the United States and Canada.” The reason why this specific innovation is able to stand out among thousands of entrepreneurial ideas is that it looks deep into what the consumers actually need and also reduces customers’ costs and risks for going to a bar. These are all downstream activities performed by the business, in another word, customer related activities.

In the article “When Marketing Is Strategy,” the author Niraj Dawar classifies all business strategies into two big categories, upstream activities and downstream activities. Based on his definition, upstream activities are the actions that a company take in order to improve their product or to reduce cost. On the other hand, any downstream activity is a company’s will to shape customer perception and to reduce customer costs. Throughout the article, Dawar strongly suggests businesses to tilt towards downstream activities since these activities actually help the business to build trust with the customers and gain accumulative advantages.

In the example of wine and painting company, the business focuses heavily on building connection with customers and shaping a new customer perception towards the painting activity. Because at the end of the day, every single customer has a job to be done, so when the paint-and-sip idea stands at the customer’s point of view and satisfies their needs to get relaxed , their success is inevitable. Imagine if instead of providing alcohol during the class, the business decides to hire better teachers or install better equipments, they would still gain positive outcome but it would certainly not be as dramatically as the paint-and-sip idea. Therefore, from my perspective, if the paint-and-sip industry wants to accumulate their advantage in the future, they should improve the customer experience by performing more downstream activities because the anticipation of experiences is more precious than the anticipation of buying merchandise.

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Paintingwithatwistfranchise.com. (2017). Leading Concept | Painting With a Twist. [online] Available at: https://paintingwithatwistfranchise.com/leading-concept [Accessed 16 Oct. 2017].

Harvard Business Review. (2017). When Marketing Is Strategy. [online] Available at: https://hbr.org/2013/12/when-marketing-is-strategy [Accessed 16 Oct. 2017].