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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Innovation continues to be a determining factor in organizational success. Intrapreneurship is the practice of creating new business products and opportunities in an organization through proactive empowerment. The good news is that virtually all the gateways to instilling intrapreneurship in an organization are institutional or systematic patterns of behavior, not resource-dependent.
There is no getting around the fact that as our organization experiences increasing competition we are under increasincg pressure to find new products, ideas, better ways to make things happen, new approaches to business, and the like ... this is a real struggle without creating an environment for internal incubation or intrapreneurship or call it what you like..... Management can create a culture to support this activity or it can put up barriers by our action. ...Without this critical activity, keeping up with market changes only gets tougher."
- A middle manager's observation
The marketplace of the 21st century is replete with a wide range of business challenges, and none of them is more daunting than that of creating a more productive, innovative, and customerfocused workplace. While modern organizations must reduce costs, improve quality, reduce cycle time, enhance revenues, and provide effective customer service, many people would argue that the key to getting better results in each of these critical performance areas is creating a more empowered and energized organizational operating environment.
When organizational leaders commit to creating and developing a workplace that encourages creativity, innovation, empowerment, action, and accountability for better performance, myriad positive things can happen. One of these positive outcomes can be an increase in intrapreneurship, which is a key component to organizational success, especially in organizations that operate in rapidly changing industries.
Intrapreneurship is the practice of creating new business products and opportunities in an organization through proactive empowerment. Like its better-known counterpart entrepreneurship, intrapreneurship is propelled by an individual's or a team's willingness to take calculated risks and act to create business opportunities that serve an organization's needs for growth and improvement.
Entrepreneurship is difficult to foster and maintain once an organization grows, becomes established, and achieves a certain level of success. This happens because the very forces that drive entrepreneurship are stifled and squelched as organizations add personnel, layers of management, structure, new policies, and...