Crowd-Venturing: How Companies Leverage Human Resource Creativity for High-Performing Corporate Entrepreneurship

Purpose – Corporate entrepreneurship is an articulated process that originates from creative ideas of managers and employees and ends up in generating innovative results such as new business units and ventures. It is thus a key driver of strategic renewal and business performance for organizations, which need to valorize the creativity of individuals and teams (the internal “crowd”). This article introduces the concept of crowd-venturing as an application of collective intelligence principles in the corporate context. A set of individual and organizational factors supporting the entrepreneurial potential of human resources is defined and used to build a tool for assessing the maturity of crowd-venturing within companies. A classification of organizational archetypes is also proposed. Design/methodology/approach – The study starts from a review of corporate entrepreneurship and organizational creativity literature, with a cross-domain investigation of related areas such as human resource management and collective intelligence. The work of theory review is a basis to define an integrated assessment tool that has been applied in preliminary studies conducted in three big ICT companies. Originality/value – The research proposes a systemic model for the exploration of drivers of corporate creativity and entrepreneurial dynamics. The concept of crowd-venturing is defined, along with an assessment tool useful to evaluate the maturity level of both individual and organizational factors respect to the internal entrepreneurial process. The study can be conceived as a new application of collective intelligence principles in organization-related issues. Practical implications – The article provides managers with a method and an operating tool for assessing the internal entrepreneurship environment and the corporate venturing process. The in-company application of the tool can open new avenues for developing methodologies addressed to activate entrepreneurial dynamics within organizations.