Because of its positive impact on organizational growth and innovation, intrapreneurship has attracted interest in recent times. While its positive impact on organizations benefitted from extensive research over the last years, research on the willingness of employees to adopt intrapreneurial behavior remains low. This paper therefore aims to evaluate the attitudes of employees towards intrapreneurial behavior at work and what kind of working environments are suitable to encourage such behavior. Thereby, the potential risk related to such behavior is placed in the wider risk literature and then critically analyzed. The paper provides a theoretical background on intrapreneurship evincing the development of terms and definitions and identifying relevant authors in this research area. Based on previous research, the analysis of data provides new insights on employees' willingness to adopt intrapreneurial behavior and what working environments might be appropriate to support such behavior and enriches and deepens the understanding of these aspects. The findings show most respondents tended to aspire to intrapreneurial behavior and felt positively motivated towards shaping the organization's future. However, the related working environments are not always suitable and supportive for intrapreneurial behavior. Future research and the collection of further data could further enhance the understanding of employees' behavior and motivation related to intrapreneurship and a distinction of employees' and employers' thoughts might help to gain new knowledge in this field.

No abstract

In recent years, there has been an explosion of interest in entrepreneurship from both practical entrepreneurs and researchers. While theories are helpful for explaining business-driven activities in a startup, they are also valid in reasoning for the practical activities occurring in the entrepreneurial context. We believe that startups would benefit from the awareness of these entrepreneurial theories and the understanding of how they can be connected to decision making in both business and engineering perspectives. In particular, we want to focus on theories that are already used by practical entrepreneurs and their advisors. As an example, we have studied the Scandinavian entrepreneurial ecosystem. We selected six groups of theories that might be particularly relevant for the startup population, namely (1) core competence and resource-based view, (2) effectuation, (3) the fulfillment of entrepreneurial opportunities, (4) bricolage, (5) business model innovation, and (6) lean startup. In this chapter, we explain these theories including the ongoing research around them, the connections among these theories and how they can be applied in a real case study.

Intrapreneurship became a research topic of wide academic interest in recent times. The related subjects studied include its positive impact on organizations, the required working environments and external conditions as well as its impact on employees' behavior, motivation, etc. However, research on the potential barriers and risks related to intrapreneurship remains low. As recent studies tend to focus on single influence factors, there might also be a lack of systematic approaches to study the phenomena, acknowledging the variety of interdependent variables. This paper therefore suggests a systems theory-based approach to assess possible barriers of intrapreneurship in organizations under consideration of risk, systems and organizational behavior. After an outline of previous work on intrapreneurship in general and possible related threads and risk specifically, the sensitivity analysis method of Vester (2000) is adapted to develop a draft model of interconnected influence factors for intrapreneurial activities in organizations. This conceptual model should serve as a basis for further empirical research on the subject and supports the understanding of interdependencies between variables in an organisational system. The application of the model in a single-case study suggests that the influence factors 1) market situation, 2) attitude of employees, 3) skills and creativity, 4) values and goals of the organization, 5) working environment, 6) agility and rule breaking tolerance, 7) managerial processes or management support, 8) communication processes, 9) knowledge and 10) intangible assets could have a high impact on intrapreneurial activities. Future research could make use of this approach and empirically validate the conceptual model. It could be further enhanced through semantic modelling to illustrate the network of interdependencies.

Entrepreneurial activity and especially sustainable entrepreneurship (SE) significantly impact the achievement of the sustainability transition. While we have a decent understanding of the drivers of entrepreneurial activity, there is limited knowledge and no systematic consolidation of existing work examining what motivates entrepreneurs to engage in SE. To address this issue, we conducted a systematic literature review analyzing 50 papers derived from the Scopus database since 2017. We found that the specific construct discussed in this literature is the Motivation for Sustainable Entrepreneurship (MSE) and argue that it is a combined construct comprising the motivation to have an impact on sustainability and the motivation to become an entrepreneur. We conclude by suggesting three areas for future research: First, a clear definition of MSE is needed, distinguishing what constitutes motivation for impacting sustainable development and motivation for engaging in entrepreneurship. Second, despite having a good understanding of the factors influencing MSE, these are often based on specific case-studies and could benefit from larger and more diverse samples as well as research methods. Third, we have a very limited understanding of the effect of MSE on new venture creation, entrepreneurial practices, performance, and success.