Venturing into the Entrepreneurial Unknown: on Entrepreneurship, Intrapreneurship and Extrapreneurship in the High-tech Industries

An article published in Newsweek in 1999 posed the following intriguing question: Can Extrapreneurship become a buzzword? Expectations at the time were high: the related concepts of ‘entrepreneurship’ (=starting one’s own company) and ‘intrapreneurship’ (=starting up new business activities within a larger company) had already become part and parcel of many management courses and MBA programmes, so why wouldn’t ‘extrapreneurship’ become equally popular? Extrapreneurship is associated above all with starting up a business from an existing (parent) company in the form of an independent spin-off (or sell-off, in the case of a complete sale), possibly supported and prepared by a strategic investor and/or incubator. These activities could be considered complementary to entrepreneurship and intrapreneurship.