SARAH J. CLARK

Rather than lose creative employees who may quit to start their own businesses, employers now encourage creativity through intrapreneurships. An intrapreneur is an employee who is given funds and freedom to create a special unit or I department within a company in order to develop a new product, process, or service. Although the new venture is financed by the main company, intrapreneur enjoy the freedom of running their operations with little or no interference from upper-level managers.
Some of the largest corporations in the United States provide intrapreneurships opportunities. By so doing, valuable employees provide the company with Innovative products and services. International Business Machines (IBM), for example, entered late into the personal computer market. When IBM decided , make a small computer, it needed a good product in a hurry. An intrapreneurship unit was created. Within a brief period, the employees who voluntarily joined the unit made a personal computer that soon outsold other brands.
IBM and other major corporations such as 3M and General Electric have also captured the innovative abilities of employees with entrepreneurial characteristics. Employees benefit because they risk neither their salaries nor their savings to Launch a new business. Employers also benefit by keeping creative employees ‘ho might have started successful competing businesses. Furthermore, employers and consumers benefit because new and better products, processes, and services are introduced at a quickened pace through intrapreneurships.
In recent years, businesses that struggled for survival in a global economy offered an ownership opportunity to employees. That opportunity became known as an employee stock ownership plan (ESOP), which permits employees to directly own the company in which they work by allowing them
Ito buy shares in it. Companies benefit by obtaining funds from employees who buy shares and thereby become highly motivated to make their company a success. ESOPs have been shown to increase productivity. For instance, Avis,
car rental firm, has an ESOP that created employee participation groups that focused on solving problems. Avis became a more profitable company because employees worked harder and better when they knew they would share in the profits as owners.