Intrapreneurship and corporate entrepreneurship: an integrated operational and strategic model from dynamic capabilities approach

Intrapreneurship and Corporate Entrepreneurship are terms used interchangeably to refer to the entrepreneurship within an existing organization, creating confusion in this regard. Based on it, this paper aims to clarify this phenomenon presenting an integrated model which distinguishes between an operational and a strategic approach, both necessary to understand it as a whole. In the operational level, we define intrapreneurship as the process of identification and exploitation of opportunities, whereas we characterize the corporate entrepreneurship, as an entrepreneurial behavior, at the strategic level and related with the firm's capabilities to innovate, to take risks and to be proactive. In this context, we suggest to study the entrepreneurship within an existing organization from the Dynamic Capabilities approach which affords us a more comprehensive overview of this phenomenon and responds to requests from scholars to integrate the two. In this sense, this theoretical paper offers for researchers, an integrated operational and strategic model, which suggests some propositions relating the capabilities to identify and to exploit opportunities with some dynamics capabilities that extend, modify or create them. For practitioners, we depict some of these capabilities that are needed to ensure the entrepreneurial success.