Description

Description: Entrepreneurship and Innovation is important in all areas of business and plays a crucial role in the economy. An understanding of the relationship between entrepreneurship and innovation is essential for identifying new opportunities, allocating resources efficiently and for achieving sustainable competitive advantage. Therefore, it is imperative that decision makers understand the key concepts of entrepreneurship and innovation and be able to apply this knowledge effectively to create solutions to consumer, market, environmental and social problems. 

This course features dynamic and engaging video with audio narration, infographics and short quizzes to test your knowledge.

Background: Entrepreneurship involves developing a new venture outside an existing organisation whilst intrapreneurs are known as corporate entrepreneurships which is a relatively new concept that focuses on employees of an organisation that have many of the attributes of entrepreneurs. An Intrapreneur can be defined as an employee that takes risks to solve a given problem, develops a new venture within an existing organisation, exploits new opportunities and creates economic value. There is evidence that intrapreneurship helps managers to renew and revitalise their business, to innovate, and to enhance the organisation’s overall performance (Antoncic and Hisrich 2001). Intrapreneurship is an important element in organisational, economic and social development.

Similarities and Differences Between Entrepreneurship and Intrapreneurship
Unlike the entrepreneur, the intrapreneur acts within an existing organization. The intrapreneur is the revolutionary inside the organization, who fights for change and renewal from within the system. This may give rise to conflicts within the organization, so respect is necessary to channel these conflicts and transform them into positive aspects for the organization. Even though intrapreneurs benefit from using the resources of the organization for the implementation of the emerging opportunities, there are several motives why innovation is more difficult to implement in an existing organization, such as:

• The size of organization
• Lack of communication
• Internal competition among staff or departments
• Feedback received in case of success/mistake
• Dullness—Many companies are slow and reluctant to change.
• Organisational hierarchies compel employees to ask permission for actions that fall outside their daily duties.