Changing Your Company from the Inside Out

CHAPTER TWO

Four Kinds of Social Innovation in Organizations

Intrapreneurs often don’t label themselves as such. The term intrapreneur was, as far as we can tell, first proposed by two academics, neither of whom were social change agents.¹ We can only imagine that the social change agents themselves might have come up with a more artful term. In fact, as we will see in later chapters, the best intrapreneurs create descriptions of their initiatives that attract allies without seeming overtly threatening to those who might actively oppose them. However, as far as we are concerned, it remains the naming equivalent of democracy in the eyes of Sir Winston Churchill: the worst imaginable, apart from all the others.

Our working definition is this: ...