Job creation has become a hot topic in most old industrialised countries, where production is increasingly moving to the
newly industrialised countries. Typically, in many European countries, the underlying assumption in the public debate is that new jobs should mainly be created in small- and medium-sized firms (SMEs). However, studies have shown that job creation in SMEs has almost come to a standstill, and that, overall, these firms lose almost as many jobs as they create (see, for example, Hisrich, 1990; Sathe, 2003).
Other authors, e.g. Pinchot (1985) and Morris and Kuratko (2002), have suggested that there is a potential for job creation in both large and small companies, though they say little about the kind of industrial structure best suited to achieving this or about the best way to ensure job creation and growth. In any event, we have to take a starting point in the existing structure with both large and small companies. Much research has been done within the field of
entrepreneurship, focusing on the entrepreneur''s characteristics and the process of starting up a new independent company (Gartner, 1988), although it is also necessary to improve innovation in large companies. But is corporate entrepreneurship the solution, or is it just another passing fad?
Corporate venturing has often been mentioned in relation to corporate entrepreneurship (e.g. Sathe, 2003), and it has both good and bad points. Sometimes management faces new strategic dilemmas – especially if the new ventures are not closely related to the mother company''s core competencies and markets. But, as noted by Guth and Ginsberg (1990) and Sharma and Chrisman (1999) among others, corporate entrepreneurship is more than corporate venturing, and, to be more intrapreneurial, companies therefore need to take the whole organisation into account. As has often been pointed out in the literature on organisational design, different corporate structures support different organisational needs (e.g. Hisrich, 1990). Corporate structure is thus a good starting point as regards enabling
intrapreneurship.
In other words, well-established and mature companies need to experiment with new ways of organising and organisational structures that are known to enable innovation to take place, e.g. networks, loosely coupled organisations, and project organisations, as a supplement to the classic hierarchy. Notwithstanding, managers also need to recognise that innovation and renewal cannot be planned and managed in the same way as operational activities.
Another reason why innovation in large, well-established companies is important is that such companies possess more resources (both human, financial and structural) than small companies, and are therefore faced by less overall uncertainty. Often, they only expose themselves to one kind of uncertainty at a time, while entrepreneurs typically have to cope with several simultaneously, e.g. technology, markets, financial capital and branding. The transition to the knowledge society may thus be very difficult to achieve through small companies alone, which makes the focus on innovation in large companies even more important. This in turn implies directing more attention towards the key factors that enable and improve innovation within companies.
In this paper, I examine how companies can encourage intrapreneurship by means of five different enablers derived from the literature: rewards, management support, resources, organisational structure, and risk. Based on a case study of a large knowledge-intensive industrial firm, it is concluded that the factors are not of equal importance, and that in this specific organisation, other important factors also enable intrapreneurship. This leads to a proposed model consisting of eight enablers.
This paper is organised as follows. Section 2, which draws on the literature in the field, suggests a classification of corporate entrepreneurship based on four organisational perspectives, eacwith different motivations for engaging in entrepreneurial activities. Section 3 presents the methodology, and discusses the advantages and disadvantages of a single case study. Section 4 briefly describes the case company, while section 5 presents a detailed analysis of the factors from a single case. Section 6 discusses the findings and suggests how intrapreneurship can be enabled, while section 7 presents the conclusion and implications.