intrapreneur

An executive or senior manager of a large firm who uses the entrepreneurial approach to management. In order to encourage entrepreneurship, it has become common for firms to encourage risk-taking and profit-orientated behaviour among its managers by organizing a business into a number of separate profit centres. Each centre is responsible for making a profit by intra-group trading and, where appropriate, by building up its external sales and clients. This approach has been used in the service departments of large companies, giving subsidiary companies the choice of using the internal services or of going outside to independent suppliers. This process of developing an internal market for services has also been applied by the public sector; for example, the UK National Health Service was encouraged to use this intrapreneurial approach in the 1990s. Critics, however, often suggest that decisions may then be taken too narrowly, rather than for the benefit of the whole organization; the internal market in the NHS was discontinued largely for this reason in 1999.