Entrepreneur, Entrepreneurship and Intrapreneurship. A Literature Review

Entrepreneurship is nowadays a buzz word, present both in political arguments and discussions, in official debates and also in the economic literature. However, the entrepreneurship and the recognition of the entrepreneur’s role for the economic system have been revealed by different authors for two centuries. Despite of this fact, there are still controversies regarding the meaning and significance of the entrepreneur and entrepreneurship. Since then, and especially in the latest decades, some new concepts have been added to the already rich literature, e.g. intrapreneur and intrapreneurship. This paper is a modest attempt to review some old but also some recent approaches concerning the named terms and concepts, and thud contributing to a better understanding and use of these concepts. After reminding some relevant approaches regarding the terms entrepreneur and entrepreneurship, the newly emerged terms have been in our attention. Indeed, while notions like „entrepreneur” and „entrepreneurship” are widely used and known, the words „intrapreneur” and „intrapreneurship” are less commonly used and much more new but in rapidly spreading, due to the fact that the recent decades have been labeled by certain economists as „the entrepreneurship era”. The reason why the notion of intrapreneurship is less known than that of entrepreneurship is very simple to explain: the former one is pretty new, whereas the latter one has a history of over 200 years.