Intrapreneurship in Australian Firms

Abstract

This paper reports on the nature and extent of intrapreneurship (or corporate entrepreneurship) practiced by Australian businesses. We examined the relationship between measures of corporate entrepreneurship and firm growth and profitability, and utilized measures devised by earlier 3 researchers attempting to assess corporate entrepreneurship, viz: new business venturing, innovativeness, self-renewal, and proactiveness. Control variables included industry, firm age, and firm size. Interestingly, we found that the items measuring corporate entrepreneurship loaded onto not four but five factors, effectively splitting the self-renewal measure into two distinct elements. Profitability was significantly correlated with self-renewal (negative) and organisational support (positive) while growth was found to be significantly and positively related to both new business venturing and environmental munificence.