Intrapreneurship as Competitive Strategy for Talent Retention – Facilitating Factors and the Indian Context

Intrapreneurship is possibly the best way to keep talented staff, promote creativity, and optimally use company resources. Intrapreneurship in business today encompasses a variety of concepts which include: identifying and fostering employees who have intrapreneurial traits, developing an intrapreneurial process followed by organization wide dissemination of information regarding the process and developing innovation through rewarding intrapreneurial behaviour. In India, most of the companies operate stable businesses quite efficiently, but what is lacking is developing a new business from the idea stage through to research and development and successful commercialization. The organization’s capacity to innovate is greatly diminished because of the failure to identify, support and encourage innovative ideas which can be turned out to successful commercial products and services. Employees who feel that their innovative ideas are not given due recognition quit their jobs to start enterprises of their own. With India, becoming a preferred destination of MNC’s, and the economy expanding, attracting and retaining talent is a source of competitive advantage. The need of the hour is for people who are creators rather than followers. One feature of the organization that promotes intrapreneurship is that it encourages and successfully implements enough creative ideas to make a surplus of fruitful opportunities for all its employees. This paper discusses the evolution of the concept of intrapreneurship, previous studies and view points of experts, the need for intrapreneuship, the benefits of intrapreneurship to the company and employees, few cases of successful intrapreneurship in organisations and the intrapreneurial scenario in the Indian context.