Untangling the intrapreneurship process in organizations

This paper offers an inductive examination of intrapreneurship as it unfolds within organizations and portrays it as a multi-stage, nonlinear, multi-level process. Based on 81 interviews across 34 firms, we delineate four distinct phases—opportunity exploration, ideation, promotion, and implementation—and identify the organizational and individual mechanisms that enable or inhibit progress at each stage. Our findings indicate that while some enablers, such as a culture of innovation and supportive management, are consistently impactful, others, like execution skills or the ability to harness support, are uniquely critical to specific stages. We show that progress is not a linear pipeline but an iterative journey, where cross-level interactions between individual attributes (e.g., proactivity, creativity) and organizational conditions (e.g., bureaucracy, workload) determine whether an initiative gains traction. By illuminating how these mechanisms shift across stages, the paper offers a more nuanced, context-sensitive understanding of how internal ventures unfold within established organizations.