June 2026 | Entrepreneurs

Launch Without Leaving: The Case for Intrapreneurship

When Jackie Reses joined Square, the firm was still privately held and known mostly for the small white card readers that had made it a familiar sight at food trucks and farmers’ markets. She came in as the company’s People Lead, with oversight of a lending pilot called Square Capital. Traditional banks had long underserved the kinds of small business owners Square already worked with every day, and the rise of fintech was making it possible to reach them in new ways. Reses took note, and had something much larger in mind.

That something was a full-service bank inside Square. But she didn't have a team. When the operations function needed staffing, she hired one person. Step by step, she built the function and then the business, eventually facilitating more than $9 billion in loans and earning Square one of just two industrial loan charters granted in 18 years.

The outcome is impressive. But its origins were modest, and more common than many people think: a problem worth solving, the support of a willing employer, and the patience to start at zero.

Reses was an intrapreneur, and her path is more common than the founder myth suggests. Roughly 70 percent of transformative innovations have been developed inside established companies rather than launched from garages by hoodie-wearing college dropouts. For readers who already have some latitude to innovate where they work, the question isn’t whether to start from scratch. It’s how to recognize and use the conditions you already have.

The Role, Defined

The term was coined in 1985 by management theorist Gifford Pinchot to describe employees who develop new ideas, products, or business lines from within an existing organization, drawing on the company’s resources, capabilities, and reach rather than relying on external funding.

Intrapreneurs show up at every level. A senior leader could launch a new business unit. A mid-level manager could apply entrepreneurial thinking to scale an existing product line. An individual contributor could propose a process change that reshapes how a team works. Some pursue ideas already on the company’s strategic agenda; others surface ideas the company didn’t know it needed. The common thread is that they remain employees, not founders.

The advantage to both the intrapreneur and the company is significant. Intrapreneurs work with capital, distribution, talent, and brand recognition already in place. They take real risks, but those risks rarely look like the existential ones that startup founders face. As Reses puts it, the role offers a kind of safety net you don’t get when you bet your own balance sheet.

What It Looks Like in Practice

Intrapreneurial opportunities take many shapes, and recognizing them is half the work.
Some companies build the latitude into their culture. 3M’s well-known 15% Culture, in place for more than 70 years, lets employees spend roughly that share of their time exploring ideas outside their formal responsibilities. The Post-it Note grew out of that unstructured time, championed by an employee who saw an unexpected use for an adhesive his colleague had failed to commercialize.

Others create more structured conditions for innovation. Hackathons concentrate small teams on a problem for a day or a week. The hashtag, now ubiquitous in everyday writing, came from a single engineer during a 2007 Twitter hackathon. Innovation tournaments, developed by Wharton professors Christian Terwiesch and Karl Ulrich, are competitions in which ideas advance through judging rounds. Google’s recent Golden Prompt competition asked employees for the best instructions for its Gemini products. The seven winning ideas came from across the company, including prompts for tracking invoices and receipts and for flagging customers who needed an urgent response.

Some organizations deploy capital through corporate venture arms. Comcast Ventures, led by Allison Goldberg, builds a portfolio of startups in AI, digital health, and climate tech that returns financial value while keeping Comcast close to the technologies shaping its core business. Others give acquired brands room to operate independently. After General Mills bought Annie’s, it appointed Priscilla Zee to lead the division with significant autonomy. Annie’s kept its mission; General Mills supplied the scale.

Building Something from Inside

Reses’s career path to Square ran through Goldman Sachs, private equity, and a stint at Yahoo as chief development officer. By the time she joined Square, fintech was beginning to disrupt traditional banking, and she saw an opening to build something new inside a company that still operated like a startup.

The work began with no team and no template. “We started small, and made it incrementally better step by step,” she says. When the pandemic hit, Square Capital became one of the primary providers of Paycheck Protection Program loans, an essential lifeline for the small business owners the company had been serving from the beginning.

The bigger ambition, securing an FDIC industrial loan charter so Square could become a bank in its own right, took more than five years. The application was returned three times. Most of the precedents were old-school auto financiers and department store credit programs, and the banking industry pushed back hard against approving a tech company. For long stretches, Reses had no way to know whether the effort would pay off.

What carried the work was a feature of Square’s culture that Reses returns to often. Power inside the company was defined by the mission someone was pursuing, not by the size of the team they led. “I now have zero people working for me and an important idea to pursue that can change something in the world,” she remembers thinking. That framing freed her to start small without feeling diminished by it. The point of building from within isn’t to inherit a big team. It’s to create (or inherit) the conditions that let a small one matter.

What It Takes

The intrapreneur’s safety net is real, but it doesn’t cover all of the risks. One of them is working
under conditions you can’t completely control. Reses describes the FDIC waiting period as “extreme frustration and ambiguity knowing that failure was a highly probable outcome.” Internal product launches can be reassessed and tried again. Regulatory approvals can’t.

Credibility with a team is another. The people working alongside an intrapreneur have to be willing to follow them down what Reses calls a “path of folly.” That trust must be built before it’s needed, through smaller wins and consistent leadership.

Willingness to fail in public is a third. Reses notes that an executive championing an internal venture has to be prepared to be “absolutely humiliated and possibly fired” if the bet doesn’t land. That’s likely the number one reason why, even when the conditions exist for it, leaders don’t attempt to bring their intrapreneurial ideas to life.

Starting from Where You Are

Intrapreneurship is where most transformative innovation actually happens. It’s not a consolation for people who didn’t start companies, and the conditions for it are usually much better than people realize. But capitalizing on them takes a distinct blend of vision, resilience, and political navigation.

To build those skills and develop a roadmap to execute on your ideas, Wharton Executive Education’s Entrepreneurship Certificate, led by Vice Dean of Entrepreneurship Lori Rosenkopf, offers three self-paced courses of faculty-led lessons and applied exercises grounded in the frameworks of her book Unstoppable Entrepreneurs.

“Every organization is full of people with ideas,” says Rosenkopf. “An intrapreneur is the one who acts on them.”

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