Intrapreneurship

Intrapreneurship (entrepreneurship within existing organizations) has been of interest to scholars and practitioners for the past two decades. Intrapreneurship is viewed as being beneficial for revitalization and performance of corporations, as well as for small and medium-sized enterprises. The concept has four distinct dimensions. First, the new-business–venturing dimension refers to pursuing and entering new businesses related to the firm's current products or markets. Second, the innovativeness dimension refers to the creation of new products, services, and technologies. Third, the self-renewal dimension emphasizes the strategy reformulation, reorganization, and organizational change. Finally, the proactiveness dimension reflects top management orientation in pursuing enhanced competitiveness and includes initiative and risk-taking, and competitive aggressiveness, and boldness. While differing somewhat in their emphasis, activities and orientations, the four dimensions pertain to the same concept of intrapreneurship because they are factors of Schumpeterian innovation, the building block of entrepreneurship. The pursuit of creative or new solutions to challenges confronting the firm, including the development or enhancement of old and new products and services, markets, administrative techniques, and technologies for performing organizational functions (e.g., production, marketing, sales, and distribution), as well as changes in strategy, organizing, and dealings with competitors are innovations in the broadest sense. Intrapreneurship theory and measures have an American basis. While being considered universal, their generalizability has been limited because their cross-cultural testing has been extremely limited. Two main measures of intrapreneurship (the ENTRESCALE and the corporate entrepreneurship scale) were developed independently but lack validity for cross-national comparisons and do not tap all four dimensions of intrapreneurship when used independently. In order to fill the gaps in previous research, these two scales are integrated into a four-dimensional measure of intrapreneurship. Refinement and validation was done by using two samples from two distinct economies: Slovenia (a small transition economy from Central and Eastern Europe with a short entrepreneurship tradition) and the United States (a large, developed, and advanced economy that is a leader in entrepreneurship research and practice). The refined multidimensional measure of intrapreneurship was developed to be cross-culturally generalizable because its refined dimensions' scales include only cross-culturally comparable items. The refined intrapreneurship construct measure showed reasonably good convergent and discriminant validity as well as good nomological validity in terms of expected positive relationships to its antecedents (organizational and environmental characteristics) and consequences (growth and profitability) across the two samples that included large, medium-sized, and smaller firms from a variety of different industries (manufacturing consumer and industrial goods, consumer and business services, trade, and construction). In addition to the generalizability of the refined intrapreneurship construct measure, the results of this study support the notion that intrapreneurship is an important predictor of firm growth in terms of absolute growth (growth in number of employees and in total sales) and relative growth (growth in market share in comparison to competition). Firms that nurture organizational structures and values conducive to intrapreneurial activities are more likely to grow than organizations that are low in such characteristics. Open and quality communication, existence of formal controls, intensive environmental scanning, management support, organizational support, and values all help an organization become more intrapreneurial. Intrapreneurial organizations are those that engage in new business venturing, are innovative, continuously renew themselves, and are proactive. In transition economies, which are adapting their economies to more developed economies' standards of doing business, and where growth may not yet be the primary goal, intrapreneurship may be even more important for the growth and profitability of existing organizations.