{"id":64,"date":"2020-08-28T15:34:55","date_gmt":"2020-08-28T15:34:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gustavs.se\/intra\/?p=64"},"modified":"2020-12-08T15:31:39","modified_gmt":"2020-12-08T15:31:39","slug":"intrapreneurship-more-popular-than-ever","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gustavs.se\/intra\/intrapreneurship-more-popular-than-ever\/","title":{"rendered":"Intrapreneurship – more popular than ever(?)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

\u201dIntrapreneurship <\/em><\/em>as a sub-field of entrepreneurship <\/em><\/em>
has increased in importance.\u201d<\/em><\/em><\/span>1<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

\u201dIntrapreneurship […] has become crucial for organizations<\/em> to survive and maintain their competitive advantage\u201d<\/em><\/span>2<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

\u201dIntrapreneurship declared must-have skill for 2020\u201d<\/em><\/span>3<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

There seems to be quite a lot of interest for intrapreneurship these days, right? But is it really popular, or only very interesting to a small group of believers?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Google Ngram Viewer<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

One way to measure the popularity of intrapreneurship as a concept over time is to look att how often it is mentioned in literature.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

N-grams are any (n<\/em>) number of words put together in a particular sequence<\/span>4<\/sup><\/a><\/span>. \u201dIntrapreneurship\u201d is a 1-gram, \u201dCorporate innovation\u201d a 2-gram, \u201dpublic sector innovation\u201d a 3-gram etcetera. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

What Google Ngram Viewer does is chart n-gram frequencies in a large corpus of books and scientific literature (about eight million books, or six percent, of all books ever published<\/span>5<\/sup><\/a><\/span>. The charts are generated by dividing the number of an n-gram\u2019s yearly appearances by the total number of n-grams in the corpus in that year. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I’m using the tool to get a hint here, not as scientific evidence. This Wired article from 2015 gives a good understanding some pitfalls of Ngram Viewer data<\/a> (most of them doesn’t apply for this use). For more on how to use the tool in science with some credibility, see Younes & Rieps 2019<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Using a simple search in Ngram Viewer, we see that there’s an uptick in literature in 2019<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Screenshot from Google Books Ngram Viewer<\/a><\/span>6<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/figcaption><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Short explanation of other n-grams charted above:
\u2022 Corporate innovation: Another term for (corporate) intrapreneurship
\u2022 Corporate ventures: Another term for (corporate) intrapreneurship
\u2022 Public sector innovation: Another term for (public) intrapreneurship<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Trends for some of the corresponding terms in French<\/a>, German<\/a> and (simplified) Chinese<\/a> are different but also indicating a rise in quantitative popularity. One main difference is that the n-grams catches on later in these languages. Moreover, similiar terms and words in English can be used to compare trends in their quantitative popularity (e.g. six sigma’s decline<\/a>).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The term \u201dorganizational innovation\u201d<\/em> is both older and more often mentioned in literature<\/a> than intrapreneurship, but less precise. It also (and perhaps primarily) addresses change introduced from outside the organizations<\/span>7<\/sup><\/a><\/span>. By comparison, \u201dcorporate innovation\u201d<\/em> is more focused on internal processes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One big problem with Google Ngram Viewer is that does not show how many people that have actually paid any interest in the work published.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What about the actual interest then? Can we check for trends there? Well, there’s always Google Trends for that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Google Trends<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Google Trends shows \u201dlargely unfiltered sample\u201d<\/span>8<\/sup><\/a><\/span> of search requests made to Google. In the words of Trends’ FAQ<\/a>: \u201dthose relying on Google Trends data should understand that it\u2019s not a perfect mirror of search activity.\u201d<\/em> Possible reasons for Google to obscure data are:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

  1. to protect personal information, <\/li>
  2. to mitigate unwanted manipulations of search results<\/span>9<\/sup><\/a><\/span> and <\/li>
  3. to protect other business interests.<\/li><\/ol>\n\n\n\n

    Google explain their decision to make only samples of search requests available to searches in Trends with performance optimization: \u201dProviding access to the entire data set would be too large to process quickly.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    When plotting changes in search frequency and differences between different search queries, Google normalizes the data: <\/p>\n\n\n\n

    \u2022 Each data point is divided by the total searches of the […] time range it represents to compare relative popularity.<\/p>

    \u2022 The resulting numbers are then scaled on a range of 0 to 100 based on a topic\u2019s proportion to all searches on all topics.<\/p>Google Trends FAQ<\/a>, Nov. 23, 2020<\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

    \"\"
    Screenshot from Google Trends<\/a> \u2013 <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

    Some search terms are also grouped in \u201dTopics\u201d by Google. The topic \u201dIntrapreneurship\u201d shows a somewhat more decisive uptick<\/a> than queries like the pictured above, where \u201dsearch terms\u201d and not \u201dtopics\u201d are used.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    <\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Wikishark<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

    Another way to get a sense of how popular interest has changed over time is to see how often a Wikipedia article has been viewed over time, with the help of Wikishark<\/a> for example. Here, the result is interesting. There seems to have been a sudden increase in interest for the page \u201dintrapreneurship<\/a>\u201d in 2015, only to then decline gradually.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    \"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

    This does not, as far as I can see, quite correlate with an increased interest in editing the term:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    \"\"
    Screenshot from Xtools article info tool<\/a><\/span>10<\/sup><\/a><\/span>. (\u201dIP edits\u201d are changes done by others than registered logged-in Wikipedia-users, where only the IP-address of the editor is logged.<\/span>11<\/sup><\/a><\/span>)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

    Conclusion<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

    So, has the term intrapreneur really gained momentum in later years?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    In the words of RUN-DMC:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    \"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

    But to some extent, maybe, yes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    (Photo<\/a> of Ramadan siesta for cats by Alisdare Hickson<\/a>, Flickr)<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    \u201dIntrapreneurship as a sub-field of entrepreneurship has increased in importance.\u201d \u201dIntrapreneurship […] has become crucial for organizations to survive and maintain their competitive advantage\u201d \u201dIntrapreneurship declared must-have skill for 2020\u201d There seems to be quite a lot of interest for intrapreneurship these days, right? But is it really popular, or only very interesting to a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":141,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gustavs.se\/intra\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gustavs.se\/intra\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gustavs.se\/intra\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gustavs.se\/intra\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gustavs.se\/intra\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=64"}],"version-history":[{"count":20,"href":"https:\/\/gustavs.se\/intra\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":153,"href":"https:\/\/gustavs.se\/intra\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64\/revisions\/153"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gustavs.se\/intra\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/141"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gustavs.se\/intra\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=64"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gustavs.se\/intra\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=64"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gustavs.se\/intra\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=64"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}