Abstract
Encouraging employees to adopt entrepreneurial attitudes and behaviors increasingly appears to a number of economic players as the antidote to company staleness and inertia, and lack of creativity and innovation. Yet, in practice, how can firms foster these types of attitudes and behaviors ? Our study of corporate entrepreneurial practices in 22 firms provided insights into the most frequent organizational levers used by companies as well as how these levers are combined. Firms can adopt a number of approaches to foster entrepreneurship, depending on their objectives, characteristics and context. Firms thus deploy unique sets of means and resources, which are interdependent and act as a system shaping employee attitudes and behaviors. It therefore appears necessary to study both the independent means and resources used and the way they are combined into formal systems designed to effectively foster entrepreneurial behavior. After a review of the main organizational levers used by firms to effectively support and foster entrepreneurial attitudes, our article presents a typology of formal corporate entrepreneurship systems, followed by a detailed presentation and discussion of the various system types thus identified. We feel that this exploratory and descriptive study is a key step towards understanding the variety of approaches available to firms and how they can effectively implement corporate entrepreneurship.