Knot Yet Competent: Untangling Competency Frameworks to Clarify Practically Relevant Intrapreneurial Competencies

This paper reassesses entrepreneurial competence frameworks to identify and clarify the competencies most relevant for intrapreneurial practice. Current entrepreneurship education (EE) frameworks, exemplified by EntreComp, remain strongly start-up oriented and show conceptual fragmentation, overlap, and limited guidance on competence interrelations. These limitations reduce their applicability for graduates who enter organizational settings where intrapreneurial behavior drives innovation and strategic renewal. Building on Tittel and Terzidis’s tripartite taxonomy of domain-specific, personal, and relational competences, the study combines a structured systematic literature review with qualitative empirical inquiry. The literature review consolidates frequently cited intrapreneurial competencies and maps them onto the tripartite structure to produce a more coherent, pedagogically actionable taxonomy. Semi-structured interviews with corporate innovation practitioners then examine which competences employers regard as critical for employability, which competences are underdeveloped, and how organizations foster intrapreneurial behavior. The integrated findings enhance conceptual clarity by distinguishing competence types, reducing redundancy, and highlighting competence relationships that matter in organizational practice. The paper concludes with concrete implications for curriculum designers and educators, recommending a shift from start-up-centric competence lists toward curricula that explicitly develop domain, personal, and relational intrapreneurial capabilities and that align assessment and progression with organizational expectations of employability.