Entrepreneur vs. Intrapreneur

Both entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs are creative individuals willing to use their skills to develop broadly understood innovation.

Entrepreneur is an individual who apart from being the founder of the business also represent the firm's core resource and, as its leader, enjoy a high degree of decision-making authority.

Entrepreneurs make risky decisions using their own resources, thus they do not share risk with no one. Entrepreneurs tend to be externally focused. Working alone, entrepreneurs prefer to develop entire new knowledge in new organizations.

Intrapreneur is an individual that has all characteristics of an entrepreneur, but is acting within an existing organization. Intrapreneur takes personal responsibility for generating all types of innovation, introducing new products, processes and services in order to enable the company meets their objectives in area of grow and profits.

Contrary to autonomous entrepreneurship, in case of intrapreneurship, the risk is shared between the firm and the intrapreneur who is the supporter and developer of the firm's creative capabilities. Intrapreneur focuses basically on the creation of new areas of business.

Intrapreneur is eligible to use the resources of the established company like financial support or operational and administrative assistance. In case of failure, the intrapreneur may be reallocated to another position within the firm. Intrapreneurs do not bear the total risk of profit/loss along the entire process of the project development as do autonomous entrepreneurs.

So, in summary:

The intrapreneur recognizes opportunities and develops innovations from within an existing organization, while entrepreneur create and set up a new business entity. In case of failure the intrapreneur share the risk with parent company, while the entrepreneur suffers the cost of losing his job and having to search for a new occupation.