Developing Characteristics of an Intrapreneurship-supportive Culture

Abstract

Intrapreneurship is a topic with a high attraction equally to many scholars and managers in companies of any size nowadays. It is defined as entrepreneurship within existing organizations and became a subject of interest because of its effects on organizational revitalization, innovation, and the creation of new business activity. Intrapreneurship is especially important in the context of industrial R&D to develop radical product innovation as the initial phases to create new domains of business that are unrelated to the current mainstream activity of the established firm. This paper aims at developing characteristics of an intrapreneurship-supportive culture in order to facilitate intrapreneurship over time – that is, to make it happen again and again. An emergent body of literature stresses that entrepreneurial and innovating behaviours of both individuals and firms depend on cultural factors. However, still it is not fully clear how to define, build, and measure such culture that supports intrapreneurship in industrial R&D. Therefore, an extensive literature investigation has been conducted in order to identify relevant culture-bound factors that support intrapreneurship in industrial R&D. In total, 101 scientific but also practice-oriented contributions in the domain of innovation, entrepreneurship, and intrapreneurship have been studied. Guided by theory on national, professional, and corporate culture, a six-dimensional framework of intrapreneurship-supportive culture has been conceptualized. Keywords: intrapreneurship, innovation, national culture, professional culture, corporate culture.