Gifford Pinchot of Alacrity Ventures

Notable Links:

• Ecology and Business Success

• The Gift Economy

• The Intelligent Organization

Gifford Pinchot is an author, speaker and consultant on innovation management. His best-selling book, INTRAPRENEURING: Why You Don't Have to Leave the Corporation to Become an Entrepreneur (Harper & Row, 1985) defined the ground rules for an emerging field of enterprise: the courageous pursuit of new ideas in established organizations.

In his second book The Intelligent Organization (Berrett Koehler, 1994), written with Elizabeth Pinchot, the vision is broadened to include a revolutionary way of organizing all work from the most innovative to the most mundane.

Pinchot & Company, the firm he leads, helps companies reduce bureaucratic obstacles. It audits and helps improve the environment for innovation, trains intrapreneurial teams to succeed, helps managers to be better sponsors of innovation, facilitates strategic and business planning meetings and designs reward systems more favorable to innovation and wise long-term management. Its client list includes many of the largest and best-run firms in the United States.

Gifford approaches the subject of innovation from personal experience. He has started four companies, and has two patents under license. His consulting career began in new product and technology strategy. Prior to forming Pinchot & Company, he was founding president of a management consulting company which specializes in innovating solutions to business growth problems.

After graduating with honors from Harvard University in 1965 with an A.B. degree in economics, Gifford studied neurophysiology at Johns Hopkins University.

Intrapreneuring has now been published worldwide in fifteen languages. The word intrapreneur, which was coined by Gifford to describe the intra-corporate entrepreneur, has been included in the American Heritage Dictionary (Third Edition - 1992) and is selected for inclusion in upcoming editions of both the Oxford and Webster dictionaries.