This research focuses on corporate entrepreneurship within the sales unit of a multinational corporation. The multinational corporation sets the frame for the research where the realization of CE as a management concept is analyzed in the sales unit.
The purpose of this thesis is to gain an in depth understanding of entrepreneurship, and corporate entrepreneurship as a management concept. Additionally it is supposed to increase the literature on the topic of corporate entrepreneurship within a sales unit. It aims to bring the research areas of selling and sales behavior as well as corporate entrepreneurship closer together.
In order to gain the in depth knowledge required for this thesis an extensive literature review on the topic of entrepreneurship has been conducted. Corporate entrepreneurship builds on the research of entrepreneurship and is referred to as a management concept. The management concept of change management is introduced and its’ link to corporate entrepreneurship is established. The literature review also covers general research on the multinational corporation as well as the sales unit and the entrepreneurial actions already existing in the sales unit.
Furthermore a case study approach has been realized to increase the understanding of corporate entrepreneurship in real life. Therefore eight employees of a multinational corporation, who work in the sales unit, have been interviewed with semi structured interviews. The semi structured interviews were approximately one hour long, resulting in taped material of 9 hours. This material has been transcribed and with the help of the analyzing software NVivo clustered.
The clusters of NVivo formed the base to answer the research questions. Elements such as sales innovativeness and creative selling, knowledge sharing, an entrepreneurial mission statement, an employee suggestion scheme, freedom resulting in innovation and an active change management are elements realizing corporate entrepreneurship within the sales unit.
Sales innovativeness and creative selling is realized in the sales unit through new selling approaches such as cross selling and value based selling. Knowledge sharing holds a great advantage for the employees where successful ideas and tactics for example form country regions are applied to other regions or even the headquarter. Knowledge share also sparks innovation. The entrepreneurial mission statement is necessary to provide guidelines and describe the desired behavior. The entrepreneurial orientation mission statement refers to the overall entrepreneurial orientation of the company. Freedom according to the data of the case study results in innovation and motivation. Therefore general freedom in the work routine characterizes corporate entrepreneurship in the sales unit. Furthermore an active change management which is also present in the sales unit of the case company supports the process of including corporate entrepreneurship as an overall management concept.
These results lead to the conclusion that corporate entrepreneurship is realized to a certain degree within the sales unit, but still holds room for improvement. In the end the generalizability of the thesis as well as advices for future research are given.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:oulo.fi/oai:oulu.fi:nbnfioulu-201706062621 |
| Date | 06 June 2017 |
| Creators | Missel, J. (Julia) |
| Publisher | University of Oulu |
| Source Sets | University of Oulu |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | info:eu-repo/semantics/masterThesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess, © Julia Missel, 2017 |
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