Intrapreneurship: The Entrepreneurs Hidden Within the Organization

We tend to think about career choices in black-and-white terms: a job or your own business. The first option, still probably the default, offers a sense of stability and security – though at the cost of significant constraints. The second – the entrepreneurial path – despite all its difficulties and risks, promises greater autonomy, agency, and impact. Of course, this distinction is largely an oversimplification. Especially since the last few years have blurred the lines even further. A traditional job is no longer necessarily stable, and many people running their own businesses (though not always truly entrepreneurs) depend heavily on a single client, which limits their autonomy in practice.

There is, however, a third path – equally interesting, though also demanding. Is it possible to combine these two worlds and become an entrepreneur inside a large organization?

As companies grow, entrepreneurship… declines?

In the early stages of a company’s life, entrepreneurship is something natural. Founders make quick decisions, experiment constantly and search for new opportunities.

Although startups often position themselves as the opposite of corporations, their ultimate dream is actually the same – to grow and eventually become one. As the organisation scales, professionalisation of management follows – more formalised processes, tighter cost control, greater risk aversion. The company gets increasingly good at executing its existing business model efficiently. And that’s where the trap lies. Efficient management gradually pushes out the entrepreneurial spirit. The organisation gains in efficiency, but loses its appetite for exploration. At the same time, business models naturally begin to wear out. Customer needs evolve, trends shift, competitive landscapes change and new technologies emerge. What once was a competitive advantage slowly becomes the industry standard – and sometimes even a burden. I wrote about this earlier here.

In this context, it’s worth asking a provocative question: do the managers running a large organisation act more like employees or entrepreneurs? If the honest answer, in the context of your company, is “primarily employees” – and to be clear, I don’t mean that as a criticism – then a further question follows: is there anyone left in that organisation who is still actually thinking like an entrepreneur?

Three strategies. And one common trap.

When it comes to building innovation, companies broadly have three approaches:

• The passive model – putting off change for as long as possible. It sounds absurd, but in practice it’s a surprisingly common choice, particularly when current results are still looking good.
• The outside-in model – bringing in external consultants to develop strategy and generate ideas, partnering with startups, acquiring technologies or entire companies.
• The inside-out model – creating conditions in which your own people can identify new opportunities, run experiments, and develop new initiatives. This is where internal entrepreneurship – intrapreneurship – comes into play.

In reality, of course, there’s a whole spectrum of hybrid approaches – both between the internal and external models, and, unfortunately quite often, between those models and passive approach. In the latter case, organisations run various initiatives that collectively add up to what’s known as innovation theatre – a lot of noise and PR around hackathons, startup meetups, and ideation programmes, but results that are hard to translate into actual business impact. What’s striking is that despite the lack of tangible outcomes, many organisations feel quite comfortable in this mode. It allows them to appear active without making changes that might genuinely disrupt the existing order. In that sense, the appearance of innovation can feel safer for an organisation than real innovation.

Meet the Intrapreneur

Intrapreneurship – sometimes called internal entrepreneurship or corporate entrepreneurship – is essentially about activating the entrepreneurs who are already inside the organisation. Put simply: instead of looking outside for the motivation and resources to innovate, the company engages entrepreneurs already within its own structures. In practice, there’s no single way to do this. Most often, it means that employees with an entrepreneurial mindset gain a degree of autonomy and access to resources – time, budget, organisational support – that allows them to develop their ideas into new solutions that create value for customers and for the company itself. Sometimes these are incremental improvements to products or processes; sometimes they’re the seeds of entirely new business models.

Today, intrapreneurship often appears in the context of “modern” methodologies like design thinking or lean startup. I remember the early days of the innovation movement built around these approaches – corporations, highly effective at executing their existing models, looked on with a certain envy at startups that kept proposing something new and embodying that entrepreneurial spirit. Frameworks like design thinking and lean startup began to be adapted to the realities of large organisations precisely to restore their capacity for experimentation. But the idea of intrapreneurship itself is much older. The term first appeared in 1978, coined by American consultant Gifford Pinchot III, who defined the intrapreneur as “a dreamer who figures out how to turn an idea into a profitable reality“. The concept gained wider recognition also thanks to Steve Jobs. When Apple was building the team behind the Macintosh in the 1980s, Jobs deliberately isolated it from the rest of the organisation so it could operate like a startup. In a 1985 Newsweek interview, he described the team as an example of intrapreneurship – a group of people in essence, back to the garage, but in a large company

The classic example of intrapreneurship in action is Post-it Notes at 3M – a product born from an employee experiment that found an application for an unusually weak adhesive that had initially been considered a failure. There are many similar stories. Gmail at Google started as an internal project developed by an employee using time set aside for personal initiatives. PlayStation at Sony emerged thanks to the persistence of engineer Ken Kutaragi, who pursued the idea of a gaming console despite initial skepticism inside the company. In each of these cases, the key role was played by people who acted like entrepreneurs inside a large organisation. A clear renaissance of intrapreneurship came in the early twenty-first century, alongside the growth of the startup ecosystem, when large organisations began searching again for ways to recover that entrepreneurial energy within their own structures.

Why is it worth fighting for?

A well-implemented intrapreneurship programme is not just a “nice-to-have” cultural add-on – it delivers very concrete benefits:

• Business growth – a greater capacity to renew the business model and create new revenue streams, without being entirely dependent on external impulses or simply following what competitors do.
• Deeper customer understanding – innovation happens closer to the market, created by people who work with products, processes, and customers every day.
• Talent retention – the best people rarely leave because they’re underpaid. More often, they leave because they have no space to pursue their own ideas. Intrapreneurship gives them room to build and experiment without having to quit.

From idea to practice

It sounds straightforward in theory. In practice, building intrapreneurship inside large organizations often means confronting the corporate “immune system”, which instinctively rejects risk and ambiguity. Many companies try – and end up in the innovation theatre mentioned earlier. Why this happens and what conditions must be met for internal entrepreneurship to actually work is a topic for future articles. At Salto Strategies, we promote a hybrid model: entrepreneurship remains internal but is supported from the outside through the methods, tools, and experience of teams who live and breathe innovation. This is the foundation of the Salto Intrapreneurship Program, where we help organizations launch initiatives that are structured and tied to real business challenges.

One final question to leave you with – in your organisation, is entrepreneurship genuinely welcome, or does it just look good on a slide about innovation culture?