Journal of Enterprising Culture

Two competing models of innovation behavior in organizations are tested. The first model is derived from the corporate entrepreneurship literature, suggesting that the extent to which the organization has a deliberate entrepreneurship strategy determine employees' involvement in innovation and change (Kanter, 1984). The competing model is derived from the intrapreneurship literature, primarily Pinchot (1985) and Pinchot and Pellman (1999), where the emphasis is on the employee's individual personality measured by items derived from Pinchot's (1985) test: "Are you an intrapreneur?" Both models are compared to a base model that contains relevant control variables. Finally, a fourth model, which combines all variables are compared to the other three. The models are tested using a sample of 634 business graduates employed in a diverse set of occupations and organizations. The results indicate that both the strategy and personality models outperform the base model. Moreover, the model that combines the personality of the individual and the strategy of the organization performs even better than the each of the two models separately.

There is abundant literature about individual entrepreneurship (entrepreneurs) and about corporate entrepreneurship within organizations. But little is written about a related concept like Entrepreneurial Orientation (EO) in small businesses, and also, about how to describe its role in their strategic formulation.

The paper attempts to identify the main attributes of the EO concept and its determinants within small business context. EO consists of three components: Innovativeness, proactiveness, and risk-taking by strategic leaders in these firms. An innovative small business wilI not be an entrepreneurial if it does not take risks or is not sufficiently proactive towards competitors and environment.

After describing the emergence of this concept, the paper shows the importance of the EO as a valid strategic orientation for small businesses when they re-think their strategic analyses with Opportunity-based and Resource-based views. Adopting such orientation seems to reflect a needed conciliation between other strategic orientations (market-, technology- and stakeholder orientations) and altogether blending of them.

Finally, the paper concludes with proposing some implications for future research to deepen the study (conceptually and empirically) of the EO within small business context.

Many business problems do not appear in ideal conditions. Sometimes decisions have to be made very quickly, or there is no explicit knowledge regarding a problem, or there is neither enough time nor enough information. Therefore, entrepreneurs are not always equipped to make the necessary decision or to solve the problem. A successful entrepreneur needs to rely more often on intuition in making decisions and in solving problems. Intuition can be considered, for example, as a sudden awareness of knowledge. Using this type of knowledge, a person knows facts or relations, but without knowing why.

Previous studies have described the nature of intuition and they have also addressed the intuitive abilities of managers, but the actual use of intuition remains a relatively unchartered research area, as well as the intuition of entrepreneurs. The study reported here is an attempt to broaden our understanding of the intuition of family entrepreneurs. The purpose was to explore through interviews what family entrepreneurs understood by intuition and to establish what kinds of situational factors were involved in experiencing and applying intuition.

The economic dynamics of a geographical area as an "industrial district" or as an "innovative milieu" has been analyzed by numerous theories and approaches. Therefore, the complexity of the phenomenon needs more than one theory or approach to grasp all its aspects. Nevertheless, one needs to identify the core characteristics that provide the economic dynamics of a given territory. For this purpose we will adopt a synthetic analysis method to identify the main characteristics of an industrial cluster, and then elaborate a comprehensive concept that elucidates the whole phenomenon. The theoretical findings will be applied to the case of Sfax -the second biggest city of Tunisia- which presents exceptional economic dynamics. The research focusing on the economic activities of Sfax was led by authors from various disciplines, providing data needed for this paper.