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