Abstract:

Intrapreneurship is the act of behaving as an entrepreneur but inside an organisation. This requires that members of the organisation to have certain soft skills (problem solving, creativity, planing, risk management…) but also attitudes (innovation, passion, engagement...), that can be taught. However, they can only be learnt informally, that is inside a team and after years of collaboration. Intrapreneurship has been demonstrated to be very beneficial for large organisations but also for small enterprises and start-ups, looking for innovation and competitiveness.

The Erasmus+ Intranet project (www.intra-net.org) aims at creating ICT-based tools which can be adopted by teams or staff, inside organisations, to promote the acquisition of new skills and competence in a network based methodology (that is through collaborating and creating links between staff). Also, to use the ICT tools on activities to help innovative organisations in their mission towards the development of new products, increase competitiveness, solve challenges and help to build collaborative innovative teams.

In this paper we firstly define the conditions of this innovative organisation in two aspects: 1. Required skills and competences of the staff, focusing on their attitude and aptitude. 2. Internal culture of the organisation, that is principles of the innovative organisations and their strategy. In the Intra-net project then, based on those conditions, we propose ICT-based activities that could help to increase competitiveness, foster innovation and improve the quality of the teams.

This research has been done during the first stages of the project, defining 6 principles of organisations as a requirement for the intra-net approach. Secondly, 36 soft skills and attitudes are defined with the aim to be covered by the intra-net ICT-based activities. As a result of this phase, we conclude that an entrepreneur, similarly to an intrapreneur, demands of self-motivation and self-direction. The difference between both concepts is that intrapreneurship combines employee’s personal goals with the company’s aims, which is a challenge. Finally, for developing the ICT-based activities, it has been taken into consideration the inconveniences that this approach could present, therefore recommendations have been included for a better exploitation of the implemented methodology. The use of ICT has been demonstrated to be very useful, still very challenging; we are aware that most participants preferred to perform face-to-face activities, avoiding then online or virtual activities. However, due to the present way of working (global organisations, tele-working), the way the information is presented (social networking, knowledge management, quality assurance) and the busy schedules of society, technology-mediated activities are becoming increasingly essential and have been proven to have many advantages.

Keywords:

Intrapreneurship, ICT-based activities, self-motivation, competitivness.