Trying to increase your nascent company's visibility in the marketplace? Here's one tactic: Tag your concept -- original or not -- with what you hope will become a new business buzzword. Then, trademark it. That's the thinking at Philadelphia startup Foster Chamberlain LLC.

Founded by Wharton MBAs John Ulrich and Todd Peterson (32 and 29, respectively), the two-year-old company helps its clients identify products or services that fill an unmet market need and launch them. In other words, these callow entrepreneurs (it's their first startup, too) are selling their entrepreneurial skills to other entrepreneurs.

Unabashed, Ulrich and Peterson have coined the term "extrapreneurship" to describe what they do -- and they've even trademarked the word. If you want proof, ask the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office. In that they're trendy, too. Trademarking has become a minor mania, with the number of trademarks for fiscal 1998 totaling 106,279 -- up roughly 15% from 1996.

Is "extrapreneurship" an original idea? Not really. After all, high-class temp agencies will be happy to rent you a chief financial officer, a technology expert, or even a CEO to help get your young company off the ground. And consulting businesses that advise entrepreneurs are an industry in themselves. Still, the two insist theirs is no mere consultancy, though Peterson got much of his pre-MBA experience at Booz Allen & Hamilton. (Ulrich worked in American Express' marketing division.) The difference between extrapreneurs and consultants does sound slim, though: "[Consulting companies] offer advice about how to develop new businesses," says Peterson. "Our objective is to identify and evaluate a business opportunity, and then launch it as well."

BUSINESS LEXICON. Foster Chamberlain's founders hope "extrapreneurship" will become a boardroom word such as "reengineering," a term international consultancy Computer Sciences Corp. coined in the '80s to describe its technique for redefining core operations to improve efficiency.

The word "extrapreneurship" was born -- where else? -- in a Wharton marketing course. Ulrich mentioned it as the concept behind a then-hypothetical business. The course's professor, Len Lodish, thought it could catch on and urged Ulrich to trademark it. After all, "intrapreneurship" -- the notion of finding and tapping people with an entrepreneurial bent within companies -- has a niche in the business lexicon and MBA curricula thanks to such books as Intrapreneurship by Robert D. Hisrich, now a professor of entrepreneurial studies at Case Western's Weatherhead School of Management.

So what are the chances that "extrapreneurship" could become the next "it" word? Hayes Roth, a senior executive director at Landor Associates, an international design consulting company that works on brand and corporate identity, thinks Ulrich and Peterson may be on to something. "I wouldn't call it easy on the tongue. But nevertheless, it is mildly descriptive," he says. "And if intrapreneurship becomes more well known, then extrapreneurship just might strike a chord."

That would be a great boon for Foster Chamberlain, which to date has four employees, a track record with 15 to 20 clients, and project revenues of $2 million in 1999. Ulrich and Peterson aren't waiting for the verdict, though. They're in the midst of branding their next term: "contract entrepreneurs." Hmm, it sounds like they'll have to bump another unlovely buzzword -- outsourcing -- to make that one stick.

By Nadav Enbar in New York
nadav_enbar@businessweek.com

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