Recently, I became more curious about the education and training of corporate innovators and intrapreneurs and began to conduct a short study to learn more.

I was shocked to learn there are very few intrapreneurship graduate programs within university or MBA programs. In fact, when querying my colleagues about specific graduate programs, most of the responses were 'entrepreneurship and innovation' programs which are quite prolific. At first it shocked me that those who are operating within the global innovation ecosystem would point to entrepreneurship programs as sufficient for training those who are leading growth and innovation efforts within large organizations.

Full disclosure, I deeply dislike the term corporate entrepreneur.

Perhaps this distinction is meant as some practice to collaborate with startups but I don't think so. Those who are using the term corporate entrepreneur, I believe, mean to say intrapreneur. This isn't so much a semantic difference as it is a distinction between entrepreneurship and intrapreneurship skill sets.

Let's level set for a second and define entrepreneur and intrapreneur:

Entrepreneur: A person who organizes and operates a business

Intrapreneur: A person within a company who promotes or leads innovation

These are two distinctly different skills although there are some similarities. But the intrapreneur resides within an organization and typically a larger business. The skill sets of the intrapreneur and entrepreneur are distinctly different and should be treated as such. If this is the thesis, then why aren't more traditional education and graduate programs focused on developing the skill set of the intrapreneur during formative years?

There are ample corporate innovation management training programs available for the professional although very few formal education options and I don't know why.