Intrapreneurship is entrepreneurial behaviour inside an established organisation: employees who conceive, champion and build new products, ventures or processes with the company’s resources and within its risk envelope. The institutional forms range from innovation time and internal incubators to corporate venture studios and formal spin-out programs; celebrated artefacts include products born as employee side projects inside large technology companies.
The structural tension is incentives. Entrepreneurs are paid in equity and autonomy; employees are paid in salary and process. Programs succeed when they import enough of the founder deal — dedicated teams, protected budgets, separate governance, meaningful upside (phantom equity in the venture, milestone bonuses, or real equity upon spin-out) — and fail when “acting like an owner” is requested without any ownership being offered. The selection problem is real too: the corporate antibodies that kill bad ideas kill good ones indistinguishably.
The ownership questions underneath
Intrapreneurship runs straight into IP and employment law. In Türkiye, employee inventions are governed by the Industrial Property Code (SMK art. 113 et seq.): service inventions belong to the employer upon claim, with the employee holding a statutory right to reasonable compensation — a regime many internal-venture programs discover late. Copyrightable work made within the scope of employment vests in practice with the employer, but “scope of employment” gets contested precisely for passion projects at the edges of a job description. And when the venture spins out, the clean questions begin: who assigns what IP, on what valuation, with which employees released from non-competes. Programs that answer these in the program documents — not at spin-out — keep their successes.
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