Intrapreneurship (Corporate Entreprenership)
A great deal of the literature on intrapreneurship assumes that it is important and desirable to foster corporate entrepreneurial thinking and behaviour in organisations (Covin & Slevin, 1991; Zahra, 1993, 1994; Lumpkin & Dess, 1996). While much has been written about the need for established firms to become entrepreneurial, not much progress has been made to determine exactly how entrepreneurship can be accomplished and sustained in these organisations.
Recent integrative models in the realm of intrapreneurship have indicated that there are mainly individual, organisational and environmental factors that are related to intrapreneurial behaviour (Covin & Slevin, 1991; Birkinshaw, 1999):
Individual propensity to act entrepreneurially is a function of motivation (McCLelland, 1967; Kets de Vries, 1977), which in turn is a function of the individual's innate personality and the context in which he or she is working (Birkinshaw 1999).
Different authors support the view that intrapreneurship activity is a function of the organisational context (Birkinshaw, 1999; Morris & Kuratko, 2002). Birkinshaw (1999) defines organisation context as a set of administrative and social arrangements that shape the behaviours of individuals in the organisation over which top management have some control. The essence of Birkinshaw's (1999) definition is that entrepreneurial initiative, like any other behaviour is a function of the setting in which it occurs, and that within an organisation many of the critical success factors for intrapreneurship are under the direct and indirect influence and control of top management. Reward systems, reporting relationships, access to financial resources and a host of other factors, all influence and shape the behaviour of people in an organisation. These factors together constitute the organisational context.
Environmental factors relate to Bartlett and Ghoshal (2002); Adonisi. (2003); and Birkinshaw (1999) argument that the behaviour of individuals within the organisation is shaped by more than just administrative factors. These authors argue that external environmental factors such as customers, suppliers, competitors and institutional bodies with which the organisation interacts, all profoundly influence the behaviour of individuals in the organisation.
What follows, is a discussion of the individual, internal/organisational and external/environmental variables that are related to intrapreneurship in organisations. These variables can however not be seen as totally independent, but in interaction, reciprocally related.
Source: Wikipedia
