Collaborating for Innovation

Abstract

This chapter looks inside the firm at how organizational design affects collaboration in pursuit of corporate entrepreneurship or “intrapreneurship.” It shows how the intrafirm “marketplace” of ideas, employees, and resources can be strategically configured to encourage or inhibit collaborative innovation. The chapter focuses on the key structural dimensions of autonomy, sponsorship, and incentives. Complementarities between these dimensions create spillover effects that produce unique innovation outcomes by mitigating barriers to collaboration such as knowledge problems, resource constraints, and employee motivation. Illustrating configurations of these dimensions with company examples, the chapter shows how organizational design affects intrapreneurship and offers suggestions on how firms might strategically align their organizational structure with their intrapreneurial strategy.