The entrepreneurial intrapreneur: a managerial approach to building entrepreneurial competencies

This study explores managerial practices that could encourage the development of more intrapreneurs in the organisation based on existing research of entrepreneurial and intrapreneurial competencies and the current shortage of intrapreneurs in existing organisations. We base suggestions for these managerial practices around 13 previously established entrepreneurial competencies taken from earlier entrepreneurship research. For each of these entrepreneurial competencies, we propose specific recommendations for managers that would help shift people from the employee mindset to intrapreneurial competencies and thus creating more intrapreneurs, and as a result, benefiting the organisation. Our recommendations include garnering of resources by the intrapreneur, a greater assumption of risk by the intrapreneur, and the requirement of multiple iterations of the product development process. We suggest incorporating such practices as it could result in more intrapreneurs being created within existing organisations and thus making those organisations more customer centric and efficient. These practices could hence be the basis of firm renewal for existing firms.