AEI 2023
Blondel, F. and Corbel, P. « L’intrapreneuriat, un régime de liberté surveillée », 13th Congress of the AEI (Académie de l’Entrepreneuriat et de l’Innovation), Strasbourg, June 2023
Abstract:
Hackathons, company "fab-labs", in-house incubators, corporate venture capital or, more simply, training courses in entrepreneurship and its most fashionable tools and approaches (design thinking, lean startup...), large companies have probably never put so much emphasis on intrapreneurship. Is this just a fad, or a more profound movement? Analyzing the phenomenon from the angle of its links with control and freedom enables us to return to the foundations of the approach, and to put into perspective both the underlying logic of this phenomenon and its limits.
A number of authors have questioned the value and validity of intrapreneurship schemes, and their legitimacy within an organization. Entrepreneurship refers to practices aimed to facilitate innovation, at the risk of sometimes conflicting with the existing organization. Our research question seeks to relativize the often angelic approach to intrapreneurship within large organizations: Intrapreneurship: a regime of supervised freedom?
This tension between the central and peripheral dimensions of intrapreneurship is the guiding thread of this theoretical contribution. More specifically, we approach it from the angle of the degrees of freedom associated with this freedom. We return to some of the fundamentals of strategic management before drawing out a number of implications for intrapreneurship.