Enterprise and Small Business Principles
Intrapreneurship
In many economies, large companies are a result of the favourable trading conditions enjoyed in the immediate years after the Second World War, with corporate bureaucracies set up to manage large-scale businesses operating in stable global conditions. As with the development of self-employment and the small firm (see Chapters 2 and 3), the growth in interest in entrepreneurship at a corporate level is due to a combination of various internal and external factors (Jones, 2005; Thornberry, 2001; Gibb, 1990; Kanter, 1989b) including:
■ the blurring of boundaries between the formal and informal labour markets, with serious consequences for labour mobility and job security, especially for white-collar workers;
■ the change in attitudes towards entrepreneurship, with a higher degree of individualism, particularly among the middle classes who are the professional workers within many large organisations;
■ increasing rates of product and market obsolescence - as life-cycles become shorter and the rate of process and technology change faster, there is demand for a higher degree of innovation within the organisation (see Chapter 5);
■ the technological revolution, predominantly in computing and information science, which has had global consequences for industries as diverse as financial services and agriculture;
■ economic uncertainties leading to changing and unstable market conditions;
■ pressures on the manufacturing sector to discard unnecessary overheads and externalise previously internalised services.
To cope with these changes, large firms have increasingly adopted more innovative and enterprising approaches to management within their organisations (Sharma, 1999; Birkinshaw, 1997; Stopford and Baden-Fuller, 1994). One of these approaches is the development of entrepreneurship within a corporate environment, known as intrapreneurship, which is an attempt to integrate the strengths of small firms (such as creativity, flexibility, innovation and nearness to market) with the market power and financial resources of large companies. However, there have been doubts whether this can be achieved successfully and whether this may just be another management ‘fad’ adopted by large firms (Duncan et al., 1988).
