The Intrapreneurial Nature of Organizational Innovation: Toward a New Process Model

Abstract

While innovation research for a long time has been preoccupied with technological innovation, in recent years growing interest has been sparked for research in organizational innovation understood as the invention and implementation of an organizational practice new to the state of the art. However, little is known about the mechanisms and processes generating this non-technological type of innovation. In this paper I argue that organizational innovations are usually not produced by way of institutionalized R&D processes but are the result of entrepreneurial employee behavior that breaks with customary business practice. Understanding organizational innovations as a form of intrapreneurship, I develop a new type of process model, explaining their emergence by combining insights from entrepreneurship and innovation studies.