Intrapreneurship: Construct refinement and cross-cultural validation

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 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-caking, and competitive aggressiveness, and boldness. While differing somewhat in their emphasis, activities and orientations, the forts 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 nor tap all four dimensions of intrapreneurship when used independently.