Augusto Felício et al. (2012) suggest that intrapreneurship can be explained by innovation and several other pivotal factors. Researchers link intrapreneurship with innovation mainly from the following perspectives: definition, process, and outcomes. From the perspective of definition, Vesper (1984) defines intrapreneurship as “employee initiative from below in the organization to undertake something new; an innovation which is created by subordinates without being asked, expected, or perhaps even given permission by higher management to do so” (p. 295). Carrier (1996) indicates that intrapreneurship is the same as innovation that is initiated bottom-up by employees. Covin and Miles (1999, p. 49) state that “innovation is at the center of the nomological network that encompasses the construct of corporate entrepreneurship.” Later, Antoncic and Antoncic (2011) stress that intrapreneurship comprises the following key components: business self-renewal, new business ventures, and innovativeness related to product, service, process, or technology. Hence, intrapreneurship and innovation appear to represent two sides of the same coin.

From the perspective of process (i.e., employees and their behaviors), intrapreneurial employees often generate and pursue innovative ideas and information. Through sharing ideas and information with peers, the organization becomes more competitive and innovative. Specifically, research considers intrapreneurial employees and projects as important driving forces for a firm’s innovation and strategic renewal (Rigtering and Weitzel, 2013). Regarding intrapreneurial behavior, this term manifests itself in various dimensions such as employees’ creativity, proactivity, innovativeness, ability to explore/exploit business opportunity, as well as their networking and risk-taking behaviors (Neessen et al., 2019). Thus, intrapreneurial behavior can be perceived as a type of innovation-related outcomes. Research suggests that employees’ intrapreneurship relates positively to their voluntary searching and sharing of signaling information (i.e., scouting) (Park et al., 2014). Employees’ scouting behaviors are considered as strategic and may create value for firms. Through recognizing and disseminating crucial information for managerial and operational innovation, these behaviors also help the organization enhance its adaptiveness (Kim and Rhee, 2011). Furthermore, Skarmeas et al. (2016) assert that intrapreneurship can enhance a firm’s present and future performance via exploration and exploitation capabilities (i.e., innovations-driven dynamic capabilities), which develop new knowledge or improve existing knowledge about a market.

From the perspective of outcomes (e.g., innovation as intrapreneurial outcome), there exists several studies explaining why and how intrapreneurship drives innovation (e.g., how the intrapreneurial activities relate to a firm’s innovative performance) (Camelo-Ordaz et al., 2012). Intrapreneurship becomes increasingly popular among practitioners to foster innovation and exploit business opportunities within a firm, as well as enhance the firm’s innovative performance (Rigtering and Weitzel, 2013). Particularly, intrapreneurial efforts lead to various innovative results, for example, organizational renewal, creation of new businesses, and various product/process innovation (Vargas-Halabí et al., 2017). Likewise, intrapreneurial outcomes can be measured from the following perspectives: organizational self-renewal, new business ventures, and innovations (e.g., developing new products). Other exemplary outcome variables in intrapreneurship include long-term organizational performance and individual success (e.g., Rigtering and Weitzel, 2013; Baggen et al., 2016). In short, intrapreneurs can be viewed as employees who demonstrate innovative characteristics and behaviors at work, and thus achieve innovative outcomes for firms. Intrapreneurship, as a result, can be perceived as an innovation driven by employees’ spontaneous behaviors.

Several studies probe into the similarities and differences between intrapreneurship and entrepreneurship, and how they relate to each other (e.g., Douglas and Fitzsimmons, 2013; Chahine, 2021). Intrapreneurship and entrepreneurship share several common characteristics such as innovation, creation of value, and undertaking risk (Cadar and Badulescu, 2015). Entrepreneurs often take advantage of their human and social capital to establish ventures, and sell products/services to external customers. In contrast, intrapreneurs usually initiate new business opportunities within their organizations (Parker, 2011). Furthermore, intrapreneurial activities have a higher success rate compared to regular entrepreneurial startups (Shah et al., 2014). Specifically, the intrapreneurial success rate can be as high as 80%, whereas the success rate for typical startups is around 20%.

With respect to individual characteristics, first, research finds that self-efficacy relates to both intrapreneurial and entrepreneurial intentions (Douglas and Fitzsimmons, 2013). Nonetheless, considering the principal outcomes for an individual, intrapreneurship and entrepreneurship indeed represent distinct entrepreneurial behaviors. Specifically, employees’ attitudes toward personal income, ownership, and autonomy at work are associated with their entrepreneurial intentions, whereas their attitudes toward risk are associated with intrapreneurial intentions. Second, intrapreneurs and entrepreneurs are both innovative persons. They aim to add further value to the products and services. Both the intrapreneurial and entrepreneurial activities engender a higher degree of risk compared to other regular activities in the firm. However, the intrapreneur risks the firm’s resources (e.g., funds etc.) aiming to develop new products and services, whereas the entrepreneur takes risks with his/her own financial, social, and human capital.

With respect to organizational deployment, research suggests that the entrepreneurial leadership model can be applied to the intrapreneurial context in the education sector, except for the risk-taking competency (Boon et al., 2013). Furthermore, entrepreneurial research proposes two main approaches to set corporate entrepreneurship within a firm: focused and dispersed (Birkinshaw, 1997). The focused approach [e.g., new venture division (NVD), internal corporate venturing, etc.] assumes that intrapreneurial activities represent distinct work processes that should be separated from other regular managerial works within the firm. In contrast, the dispersed approach suggests a dual role for every employee, namely, both managerial and intrapreneurial behavior. The dispersed approach allows firms for sensing greater diversity of intrapreneurial opportunities as the intrapreneurial activities are deployed throughout the organization, rather than limited within an NVD. Under such setting, every employee is a potential bottom-up intrapreneur. Later, research examines the contributions of various managerial levels (i.e., top-, middle-, and operating-level) to the CE process at different stages (i.e., discovery, evaluation, legitimation, and exploitation) and their exchanges between each other (Belousova and Gailly, 2013). Indeed, quite a few studies emphasize the pivotal role of middle-level managers’ role in encouraging intrapreneurship (Kuratko et al., 2005; Blanka, 2019). As such, middle-level managers advocate, modify, and guide intrapreneurial opportunities and further determine, obtain and allocate necessary resources to pursue these intrapreneurial opportunities (Blanka, 2019). In other words, middle-level managers support corporate entrepreneurial initiatives broken down from top level executives and promote their value creating potential to operational-level managers, namely, the primary executors (Kuratko et al., 2005). Still, organizations pursuing CE strategies are likely to demonstrate a stratified but integrated series of intrapreneurial actions at the top, middle, and operational-levels of management; managers across organizational levels take joint responsibility for the success of these intrapreneurial actions (Hornsby et al., 2009). Hence, the focused approach resembles the intrapreneurial deployment in a top-down manner whereas the dispersed approach typifies the bottom-up intrapreneurial process.

Together, intrapreneurs can be perceived as internal entrepreneurs who take risks (though different to the type of risks typical entrepreneurs may face), add values to their work, and contribute to product/service innovations, new business ventures, or strategic self-renewal within the firm. Intrapreneurship is thus entrepreneurship within an existing organization with a bottom-up, instead of top-down focus. Furthermore, managers across levels play specific roles in the intrapreneurial process.

Business sustainability focuses on what needs to be sustained (e.g., organizations) and what needs to be developed (e.g., individuals) (Shepherd and Patzelt, 2011). For businesses, sustainability is the ability to exist and develop without depleting further resources, namely, making use of existing resources, for the future. In this regard, it is not surprised that intrapreneurial research stems from the need to develop a sustainable approach to achieve innovations within a firm (Covin and Slevin, 2002). Focusing on innovation alone, however, is not sufficient for sustainability in the current hostile business environment. Intrapreneurship may relate to sustainability in multiple ways, namely, strategically or behaviorally.

From the strategic perspective, to achieve sustainable development, firms need necessary and specific resources and capabilities. For example, research considers intrapreneurship as a vital strategic resource that guides a firm’s principle of competition, and leads to sustainable firm performance (Urbano et al., 2013). From either the resource-based view (i.e., intrapreneurship as a strategic resource) or dynamic capabilities view (i.e., intrapreneurship as a firm-specific capability), studies aver that intrapreneurship acts a pivotal role for firms to attain sustainability (e.g., Skarmeas et al., 2016). In particular, Criado-Gomis et al. (2018) consider both intrapreneurship and sustainability as the internal organizational generative capability (i.e., the capability to reconfigure operational capabilities to address external changes and lead to organizational renewal), as Teece (2007) defines the term “dynamic capability.” Their study further shows that intrapreneurship indeed facilitates the process, through which, sustainable entrepreneurial orientation exerts positive effect on business performance.

From the behavioral perspective, research avers that employees’ intrapreneurial behaviors relate positively to their job performance (Ahmad et al., 2012). As such, creating a work environment that is conducive for employees to behave intrapreneurially helps foster innovative culture, which in turn leads to a firm’s sustainable long-term growth. Scholars examine how intrapreneurship in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) attains sustainable innovation via process innovation. The results indicate that the elements of intrapreneurship such as proactiveness, risk taking and autonomy pave the way to sustainable economic, environmental and social innovation (Widya-Hastuti et al., 2016). Furthermore, Parris and McInnis-Bowers (2017) suggest that entrepreneurial activities within organizations, namely intrapreneurship, serves as a mechanism to bring forth profitable results for firms; it also provides valuable solutions for the society to achieve a sustainable future. The above discussion indicates that, through the lens of sustainability, intrapreneurs can be viewed as a critical human resource that firms need to develop to achieve sustainability. Intrapreneurship, from an organizational view, can be perceived as a sustainable strategic resource and dynamic capability, that firms can adopt to exploit or explore business opportunities.

To demonstrate the intertwined relationships among intrapreneurship, innovation, entrepreneurship, and sustainability, the study proposes the following Venn diagram of intrapreneurship: at the confluence of these three constituent theoretical perspectives (Figure 2). The study also summarizes the relationships between intrapreneurship and innovation, entrepreneurship, and sustainability, respectively in Table 1.

As noted above, individual employees are capable of developing creative ideas to innovate organizational process from their daily work. Individuals who act as entrepreneurs within an existing organization are considered as intrapreneurs or corporate entrepreneurs. Intrapreneurs are often capable of identifying, screening, and exploiting business opportunities for the company to create value (Ma et al., 2016). Prior studies identify a list individual related factors that affecting intrapreneurship. The study summarizes these findings and proposes four major types of enablers at the individual level: self-attitudes, capabilities, judgments, and personality attributes/traits.

Organizations, particularly their internal corporate environment such as culture, structure, resources, and communication plays an important role in fostering intrapreneurship. Prior studies identify a list organizational related factors that affecting intrapreneurship. The study summarizes these findings and proposes four major types of enablers at the organizational level: developmental support and work design, resource availability, managerial style, and innovative culture.

In addition to the above enablers at individual or organizational level, there exists other facilitators or facilitating mechanisms, which exert effects on the cultivation of intrapreneurial process. As aforementioned, fostering employees intrapreneurial engagement involves several initiatives such as: (1) offering managerial support to initiate innovations, (2) developing, monitoring and implementing novel business ideas, (3) allocating time for strategic brain storming and workshops, (4) designing flexible work system with work discretion liberty, and (5) eliciting employees’ intrapreneurship spirit with appropriate reward systems. Organizations may lose employees with distinctive competencies if they fail to promote and encourage intrapreneurial initiatives within the organization (Armstrong and Taylor, 2014). To support these initiatives, the study summarizes three essential facilitating mechanisms: (1) establishing information and communication technologies (ICT) infrastructures, (2) forming organization–employee relationship (OER), and (3) creating employee–employee relationship (EER).

The study identifies three main managerial challenges, which arise from a firm’s capability in (1) fostering an intrapreneurial culture, (2) designing suitable work relationship, and (3) offering appropriate incentives. First, managerial support is essential for building an intrapreneurial culture within an organization. Intrapreneurial culture sustains the organization’s development through exploring talented employees and promoting intrapreneurial activities that foster innovation within the organization (Lukes and Stephan, 2017). Early intrapreneurial research posits that businesses may not have the organizational climate and culture to nurture intrapreneurs even if they have abundant resources (Duncan et al., 1988). This phenomenon has been improved as a growing number of firms start to realize the importance of intrapreneurship on innovation and sustainability. Still, several challenges for organizations to stimulate intrapreneurial activities remain largely unchanged over the past decades. For example, large organizations usually are not appropriate environments to nurture intrapreneurship (Sharma and Chrisman, 1999). Likewise, contention between employee and the managerial level signifies a primary reason why many intrapreneurs leave the organizations and start their own businesses (Klepper, 2001). Above all, employees with intrapreneurial spirits may have started their own businesses (i.e., became entrepreneurs) before being hired by others.

Second, as noted above, drawing on SDT and RFT, firms may facilitate the intrapreneurial process with appropriate choices of working relationships. Nonetheless, there exists apparent concerns and issues in the implementation of compensation systems, namely, fairness of an allocation under individual based compensation as well as free-riding problems under team-based compensation. The implementation of compensation systems and the type of relationships chosen for intrapreneurial action evidently influence a team’s intrapreneurial performance.

Finally, being paid employees rather than real entrepreneurs, employees are unlikely to take the risk and responsibility associated with intrapreneurship. Intrapreneurial initiatives often encounter barriers to motivating employee participation (Gibbs et al., 2017). Indeed, firms already strived to offer employees motives to involve in conventional suggestion systems that solely solicit idea submission (Gibbs et al., 2017). Furthermore, the output quality of intrapreneurship (e.g., the novelty and usefulness of generated ideas) represents another concern of managers (Perry-Smith and Coff, 2011). Based on SDT, merely resorting to intrinsic task motivation is inadequate to involve paid employees in intrapreneurship. Adopting social norms as an external stimulus, Rigtering et al. (2019) aver that automatic registration (i.e., participating in a CE initiative out of concern for the implied social norm, but opt-out is allowed) encourages employee participation without quality loss in ideas. Interestingly, providing examples decreases the novelty and number of idea submissions but the proposed ideas seems to be more useful. Still, research largely agrees that when stimulating creative performance such as novelty and usefulness, intrinsic stimuli are more appropriate than extrinsic ones. Hence, designing an intrapreneurship initiative to effectively motivate employees remains a challenge for firms.

To foster intrapreneurship, the study points out various organizational-level factors and concerns which lead to managerial challenges. In addition to the managerial challenges, several technological challenges exist. Academics and practitioners commonly agree that, technological, particularly digital transformation offers organizations opportunities to involve intrapreneurs. Ironically, while firms constantly urge the need to generate and collect employees’ ideas, in reality firms often lack tangible and IT-based tools and processes to efficiently leverage these ideas into intrapreneurial projects and innovative products. These technological challenges range from building an isolated IT system to facilitate the internal intrapreneurial process, to constructing a sophisticated digital intrapreneurship platform that connects external resources.

For example, merely building an entrepreneurially alert information system may impart a positive effect on firm’s intrapreneurial performance (Simsek et al., 2009). Nonetheless, it becomes much more challenging when developing a digital intrapreneurship platform as the platform inherently represents a “socio-technical system”, which recognizes and underlines the interaction between people and technology in the workplace (Reibenspiess et al., 2020). Entrepreneurial research avers that entrepreneurs can employ the platform-based innovation ecosystem to facilitate the entrepreneurial process (Hsieh and Wu, 2019). Furthermore, Hsieh and Wu (2019) suggest a specific type of open intrapreneurial platform for firms particularly with high commercialization and new product/service development (NPD/NSD) capabilities. “New economy” conglomerates such as Alphabet and Proctor and Gamble nurture their internal ventures via this type of platforms. Even though firms commit to offering needed resources for their intrapreneurs, quite a few large enterprises (e.g., Siemens and GE, etc.) also engage with external partners (i.e., other organizations or institutes) via the open intrapreneurial platforms. Notably, these digital platforms are often found within large enterprises. Developing such an IT infrastructure apparently remains a challenge for firms with less commercialization and NPD/NSD capabilities.

Within organizations, intrapreneurship is multifaceted encompassing the behaviors and interactions of the individual, organizational, and other environmental elements. Various levels (i.e., top-, middle-, and operational-level) of managers and employees play specific roles in the intrapreneurial process. Top and middle level managers generally focus on opportunity recognition. They are also expected to develop a strategic vision on intrapreneurship and manage the intrapreneurial process (Ireland et al., 2009). Operational-level managers and employees, as a major source of new ideas, however, are often responsible for implementation (Anderson et al., 2014). Hence, they usually play a dual role both in recognizing and exploiting intrapreneurial opportunities, and instigate renewal and innovation within the firm. Employees’ intrapreneurial creativity and domain knowledge serve as a basis for ideation (Liu et al., 2016; Rigtering et al., 2019), whereas opportunity recognition relates to specific dynamics at the dyad, group, and organizational level (Grégoire et al., 2010). Namely, the extent to which employees may unleash their creativity for opportunity recognition depends on several factors such as organizational design, how firms organize their intrapreneurial processes, and interactions among individuals in the organization (Corbett et al., 2013). To date, the above research areas still receive insufficient attention and thus merit further examination.

Extant research reports mixed results of the impact of demographical factors on intrapreneurship. For example, Moriano et al. (2014) suggest that higher educational level achieved by employees leads to more intrapreneurial behaviors. As such, well-educated employees are often competent and innovative, allowing them to initiate more intrapreneurial projects. Nonetheless, Douglas and Fitzsimmons (2013) find that employees with doctoral degrees are less likely to form intrapreneurial intentions, whereas bachelor and master’s degrees do not relate to intrapreneurial intentions. Regarding personality traits, de Vries et al. (2016) and Mahmoud et al. (2020) find a positive, while Farrukh et al. (2016) observe a negative impact for conscientiousness on intrapreneurial behavior. Across countries, Thai citizens are less inclined to engage in intrapreneurship compared to the Australians. Further studies exploring the above contradictory or interesting phenomena shall be worthwhile.

Social interaction allow intrapreneurs to collect valuable information, identify innovative opportunities, and persuade colleagues to support their initiative in the organization (Gerards et al., 2020). Research suggests that social interaction among employees supports the creation of a knowledge network for developing intrapreneurial ideas (e.g., Castrogiovanni et al., 2011). Particularly, employee’s knowledge sharing behavior facilitates the intrapreneurial process (Alam et al., 2020a). Nonetheless, concerns about the appropriate types of interactions occurred at the corresponding stages of the intrapreneurial process still remain underexplored.

As noted above, large firms may utilize the innovation ecosystem, which is based on platforms, in the intrapreneurial process according to their commercialization and NPD/NSD capabilities (Hsieh and Wu, 2019). In contrast, SMEs typically lack necessary operational and technical resources to support their intrapreneurial process. Despite organizations’ efforts to exploit the innovation potential of their employees, for SMEs, infrastructures such as digital intrapreneurship systems or platforms facilitating this innovation process are deficient. As such, employees may demonstrate the zeal and behaviors of being intrapreneurial, but innovating within organizational boundaries with the help of digital support is unlikely. Thus, future research may probe into the design of viable platforms facilitating intrapreneurial behavior particularly for SMEs.

Focused and dispersed approaches to foster intrapreneurship within firms apparently require different design of managerial mechanisms, such as work, rewards system, and performance review, etc. While a stream of research emphasizes the advantage of adopting the dispersed approach (e.g., Belousova and Gailly, 2013), these studies do not take into consideration several crucial factors (e.g., the size of the firm, nature of the business, and type of the industry). Future research may evaluate the differences between these two approaches in detail. Furthermore, inspired by the matrix organizational structure, researchers may even consider a combined approach which claims benefits from both the focused and dispersed approaches.

As aforementioned, employee judgment on risk is crucial in the intrapreneurial process. Nonetheless, prior research reports inconsistent findings. For example, Boon et al. (2013) note that both entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs are proactive, innovative, and willing to take risks, as expected. Specifically, intrapreneurs are generally reluctant to take financial risks such as the risk of losing their jobs, or the risk of being responsible for the financial losses of their firms. Instead, intrapreneurs are more willing take reputational risks such as voicing their opinions and ambitions, or initiating a complex project. Interestingly, Rigtering and Weitzel (2013) indicate that innovativeness and personal initiative, rather than risk taking, convert employees’ behavior into intrapreneurial projects. The role of risk seems to be conditional on contextual factors such as intrapreneurial stage, leadership style, etc. (e.g., Bagheri and Pihie, 2011), which warrants future research.

Research emphasizes the need to examine how intrapreneurship contributes to a firm’s development and why some organizations experience successful deployment in intrapreneurship at every hierarchical level (Wales et al., 2011). Belousova and Gailly (2013) show that various levels (i.e., top-, middle-, and operational-level) of managers play particular roles in the corporate entrepreneurial process at different stages (i.e., discovery, evaluation, legitimation, and exploitation stage). Specifically, middle level managers are critical as they stimulate operational-level employees to generate innovative ideas; meanwhile, they also need to champion ideas as part of their managerial duties. Some studies argue that under certain circumstances, senior managers in the organization possess more power to leverage the resources and thus initiate more intrapreneurial activities than first-level managers do (Urban and Nikolov, 2013). Intrapreneurial roles at different organizational levels appear to associate with some organizational factors which deserve further studies.

Evidently, nurturing intrapreneurship helps revive organizations, allowing them to adapt to external changes and achieve innovations and sustainability. From the resource-based view, intrapreneurship serves as a valuable strategic resource that enable firms to fit to their external environment. Research identifies exploitation and exploration as two pivotal approaches for firms to adapt to the environment (e.g., Skarmeas et al., 2016). Selecting between the approaches, however, needs to take into consideration the types of intrapreneurial opportunity based on strategic importance to the firm and the firm’s existing resources (Corbett et al., 2013). Even if firms may adopt the ambidextrous approach (i.e., coexisting of exploration and exploitation) when the intrapreneurial opportunity demonstrates strategic importance and capitalizes on the firm’s existing assets (O’Reilly and Tushman, 2008), it is usually difficult for firms to master exploration and exploitation simultaneously. Hence, future research may investigate the circumstances under which firms’ intrapreneurial initiatives are better suited for exploration or exploitation.