Entrepreneurial Finance, Fourth Edition: Finance and Business Strategies for the Serious Entrepreneur, 4th Edition

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Intrapreneurship

Introduction

Joseph Alois Schumpeter, an Austrian-trained economist who taught at Harvard, is considered the chief proponent and popularizer of the word entrepreneur in 1911. During the next decade, he made the following statement in support of the idea that entrepreneurship was not limited to small start-up firms, but could also occur within big established firms: “Innovation within the shell of existing corporations offers a much more convenient access to the entrepreneurial functions than existed in the world of owner-managed firms. Many a would-be entrepreneur of today does not found a firm, not because he could not do so, but simply because he prefers the other method.”¹

Thus, the idea of corporate entrepreneurship was ...