Intrapreneurship - more than a typo!

The term entrepreneurship, generally used to refer to the creation of new ventures and businesses, is familiar to everyone. Research environments often create entrepreneurs - for example, those who find a commercial application of their research and go on to form spin-out companies - and students are encouraged to develop entrepreneurial skills through schemes such as the Pitch your Idea competition, described a couple of posts back.

Intrapreneurship however, is a much less well-known term, and in fact my blogger spell-check is telling me it isn't even a real word. It was used by Macrae in 1982, and intrapreneurs have been described as "those who take hands-on responsibility for creating innovation of any kind within an organisation" (Pinchot, 1985). The essential difference between entre- and intrapreneurship is that intrapreneurship is about using your skills to create change within your own organisation, rather than taking them outside the organisation.

So......why is this important? Well, I'm really pointing this out to try and make you think about what ideas and skills you might have that could help create change here at Queen Mary. What difference could you make to your own research environment? One of the main issues that came out of the results from the 2008 Postgraduate Research Experience Survey at QM (PRES, and I will talk more about these results in a later post) was that PhD students were generally unsatisfied with the opportunities available for them to meet other researchers and to get involved in their department or the wider research community. Perhaps this means that the departments, Graduate Schools or ESD need to organise more events, and better publicise the ones they do offer. This is probably true. But it also provides an opportunity for PhD students and post-docs to think about ways in which they could organise their own clubs, social events, seminar series etc..... After all, you're the people that know best what it is that you need. Obviously being "intrapreneurial" is about more than having an idea - it's about transforming it into a reality - but if you do have an idea of something you think could be done, then talk to people about how you might make it happen! Talk to your supervisor, your colleagues, your department, me. Ask people if there might be funds available for organising an event. You never know what you might find!


Macrae, N. (1982) Intrapreneurial Now, The Economist, April 17
Pinchot, G. (1985) Intrapreneuring: why you don't have to leave the corporation to become an entrepreneur, Harper & Row, New York