Intrapreneurship in a public higher education institution: entrepreneurial characteristics of managers

In order to achieve good results related to the innovation of products and/or services, processes, procedures and new businesses, it is verified that organizations, aiming to innovate, work with management models focused on intrapreneurship (FESTA & GARCIA, 2013). Entrepreneurship can happen both in the public and private spheres, so intrapreneurship happens through the will of people in the organization to be entrepreneurial (PRADO, MACHADO, MELO, & LAPOLLI, 2011). Given this context, this study proposes to understand the entrepreneurial characteristics identified by public managers in their performance. Considering the quantitative approach, the population adopted for this work are the managers, with direction position or gratified function, of a Public Higher Education Institution (HEI), as research subjects. Data collection was carried out through a questionnaire consisting of questions to identify the respondents' profile and questions related to the study's specific objectives. The data analysis is firstly made up of the data generated with the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) software. Subsequently, analysis of variance (ANOVA) was used, where F-tests are used to statistically verify equality between means. Student's t-test was used to compare two means and check whether the difference between these means is statistically significant. It was found that the managers who responded to this study exhibit the entrepreneurial behavioral characteristics, similarly the managers interviewed find that the university has a high level of entrepreneurial orientation.