entre vs intrepreneur

7/31/2019 Entre vs Intrepreneur

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In America a number of business executives have left their jobs and started their own enterprises because

they were not given chance to test and implement their innovative ideas. Later they achieved phenomenal

success in their new venture and posed a threat to the companies they left. These executives turned

entrepreneurs are known as Intrapreneurs.

entrepreneur IntrapreneursEntrepreneur is a key person who predicts

new opportunities, new techniques, new lines

of production, new products and coordinatesall other activities.

Intrapreneurs are entrepreneurs who catch

hold of a new idea for product service or

process and work to bring this idea tofinishing within the framework of the

organization.

He likes to experiment with new ideas and

thus face uncertainty

Intrapreneurs with their innovations and

dedicated effort are perceived as valuable

asset by the organization, inspiring others.

He works for himself and for profits.They serve as champions to others in that

organization.

Entrepreneurship is the process of creating

value by bringing together a unique packageof resources to exploit an opportunity.

Entrepreneurship is the pursuit of opportunity

without regard to resources currentlycontrolled.

The Entrepreneur is typically a visionary whospots an opportunity in the marketplace and

has the passion, guile and contact base to setthe wheels in motion.

Written by Steve Winduss on September 18, 2008 10:02 pm -

An is someone who has the skills, passion and financial backing to create wealth from new business

opportunities and is willing to take full responsibility for its success or failure.

An is someone who manages that business with entrepreneurial flare in line with the expectations of the

shareholders.

Immediately we can start to see a difference. The Entrepreneur is typically a visionary who spots an opportunity in the

marketplace and has the passion, guile and contact base to set the wheels in motion. The Intrapreneur has passion and drive but

also has the operational skills of running the clockwork of the business to enable a good idea to be turned into commercial

reality. He is the inside entrepreneur.

Both preneurs set themselves aside from employees in a number of ways but perhaps the most significant is in their relationship

with the business. Its a question of committment over involvement. Employees are involved, preneurs are committed. A little

bit like the egg and bacon breakfast, the chicken is involved but the pig is committed.

There is a very simple answer to this:
http://www.smallbusinessvoodoo.com/7/entrepreneur-or-intrapreneur/


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Not every small business needs an Entrepreneur, but business needs an Intrapreneur.

In the same way that the seed of a business idea needs an Entrepreneur to shape and cultivate it, so the Entrepreneur needs the

Intrapreneur to pluck from his grasp those seeds of opportunity, convert them in to a viable commercial plan and then manage

that plan to a profitable reality.

Without the intrapreneur, ideas entrepreneurs and small business are doomed to fail.

So before you go any further, ask yourself which you are, Entrepreneur or Intrapreneur, and take action accordingly.

Entrepreneurs are opportunity driven. Opportunity comes from changes in theenvironment, and one characteristic of Entrepreneurs is that they are good a seeing

patterns of change. It is also evident that Entrepreneurs are not resource driven -while the manager asks, "Given the resources under my control, what can I

achieve?" the Entrepreneur asks "Given what I want to achieve, what resources do Ineed to acquire?"

It is the Entrepreneurs drive to acquire resources in order to exploit opportunities

that creates the high correlation between Entrepreneurship and business growth.

George Bernard Shaw wrote that "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world;

the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore allprogress depends on the unreasonable man." This describes the Entrepreneur -Entrepreneurs tend to be motivated by the dream of things that conventional wisdom

says can't, won't or shouldn't be done. This requires a certain element of stubbornperseverance. According to Tom Peters, in Thriving on Chaos, "The role of the

Entrepreneur is to stand up to all, to stand up to ridicule."

Of course, another thing that the Entrepreneur has to stand up to is failure. Becauseit is the Entrepreneurs who are out there pushing the boundaries and changing the

world, it is inevitable that they will make mistakes. An important characteristic ofEntrepreneurs is that they are good a failure - the Entrepreneur sees failure as a

temporary set-back, an investment in education, and, most importantly, an

opportunity to learn and to do better next time. Winston Churchill summed this up

when he said "Success is the ability to go from failure to failure with no loss ofenthusiasm".

The two magic words for the Entrepreneur are "What if...?" ("What if telephones

didn't have to be connected to each other with wires?" "What if customers coulddesign and brand their own bank?" "What if you could make cash withdrawals from

the check-out tills at the supermarket?", etc.) Not all the questions the Entrepreneurasks have to make total sense, however, the seed of inspiration may lie in the

answer to even the most seemingly ridiculous question. The Entrepreneur sees theworld through a kaleidoscope - constantly looking at it from different angles and

seeing resources combined in different ways to address different needs. For theEntrepreneur, everything is variable and nothing is fixed, assumptions exist only to

be challenged. (Fred Kofman's principles of Double-Loop Accounting in Senge[1998:292], sums up the typical nature of Entrepreneurial assumption questioning.)

According to George Bernard Shaw, "The people who get on in this world are the

people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and, if they can't findthem, make them.". Entrepreneurs create their own futures. Convention defines the

opposite of "reactive" as being "proactive". Perhaps a better opposite for "reactive" is"creative" - certainly the words are more similar (just move the "c" to the front). The

Entrepreneur is more than proactive, predicting the future and going with the flow -the Entrepreneur understands possible futures and creates the future of his or her


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choice.

There are three fundamental blocks to such creativity:

1. Believing you already have "the right answer". This prevents you fromunderstanding possible alternative futures and choosing to create the one you most

desire.

The more familiar not-invented-here syndrome - in which people, believingthey know more than others in their field, reject new ideas that are "not

invented here" - is viewed ... as innefficient, arrogant, and ultimately fatal toinnovation."(Hargadon, A. and Sutton, R.I., 2000, "The Knowledge-brokering

Cycle", Harvard Business Review, May-June 2000, pp158-166)

2. Taking life too seriously. If you take life too seriously, you will never feel free

enough to ask the seemingly ridiculous questions which spark inspiration.

3. Believing you are not creative. Before you can be creative, you have to choose

and create a future in which you are creative. (This presents a bit of catch-22...)

The Harvard Business Reviews notes on the case method say "Ninety percent of the

task of the top manager is to ask useful questions. Answers are relatively easy tofind, but asking good questions, that is the more critical skill." I don't see why the

rest of us should be shooting for anywhere lower than the top? Everyone in theorganisation should be able to add just as much value by asking the right questions.

Asking questions that at first seem ridiculous is perhaps the most difficult task of all.

Aristotle must have recognised this when he said "It is the mark of an educated mindto be able to entertain a thought without accepting it."

In the final analysis, there are three foundations of Entrepreneurship:

1. innovation - the ability to see things in novel ways.2. calculated risk taking - the ability to take calculated chances and to

embrace failure as a learning experience.

3. creativity - the ability to conceive of multiple possible futures and toproactively create the one you most desire.

Entrepreneurship is not an on/off phenomenon - everyone has someEntrepreneurship within them. The questions to be asked are "How much?" and "How

do we unlock more of it?"

What is different about Intrapreneurship?

There are, of course, a few things that are different between Intrapreneurship andEntrepreneurship. For starters, the Intrapreneur acts within the confines of anexisting organisation. The dictates of most organisations would be that the

Intrapreneur should ask for permission before attempting to create a desired future -in practice, the Intrapreneur is more inclined to act first and ask for forgiveness than

to ask for permission before acting.

The Intrapreneur is also typically the intra-organisational revolutionary - challengingthe status quo and fighting to change the system from within. This ordinarily creates


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a certain amount of organisational friction. A healthy dose of mutual respect isrequired in order to ensure that such friction can be positively channeled.

One advantage of Intrapreneurship over Entrepreneurship is that Intrapreneur

typically finds a ready source of "free" resources within the organisation which canbe applied to the opportunity being exploited. Intrapreneurs seek out the

organisational slack or fat, and co-opt it into Intrapreneurial ventures.

entre vs intrepreneur

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