External Entrepreneurial Orientation: a Path to Corporate Innovation

Abstract

Summary: Some companies seek to retain the most talented employees by giving them the opportunity to become intrapreneurs and develop their ideas without having to leave the company. Despite the incentives and freedom, not all employees want to become intrapreneurs and end up leaving their jobs to form their own businesses. The purpose of this paper is to present a case of a company that has taken advantage of this phenomenon to use their intrapreneurs as a way to expand the business turning them into entrepreneurs of their own businesses. In this research, the studied company operates in the tourism sector and is entrepreneurial oriented. We analyzed the trajectory of five of its former employees who set up their own businesses connected to the employer business. The results indicate that even with an organizational environment that fosters the entrepreneurial spirit in people, organizations need to admit that the business itself is the natural way of their best intrapreneurs. Rather than lose these employees, to encourage them to create new companies directly or indirectly linked to the organization's business can be a good way to reinvent organizational structures through the creation of a network of companies created by former employees that we call here External Entrepreneurial Orientation.

Keywords: intrapreneurship, Entrepreneurial orientation, Entrepreneurship, New business creation, entrepreneurial profile, Organizational Innovation, Corporate Entrepreneurship.