Intrapreneurial behavior in academia: navigating missions and contradictions

Universities are complex institutions operating on three missions – research, teaching and societal engagement – with everyday routines, approvals and scarce time, which often make intrapreneurial behavior hard to realize. This thesis explores how intrapreneurial behavior emerges in universities. The first study, a single case qualitative study of a large Italian public university, develops an empirically grounded process model that explains how intrapreneurial behavior arises from a set of salient antecedent conditions and is shaped by a core cross-mission process we label Tri-Mission Coupling (TMC). The second explores more in depth how the tensions and contradictions shape the intrapreneurial behavior of academics. This is a multi-site qualitative study of three universities in UK and Italy. It shows how pre-decisional sensemaking of contradictions of the academic profession either are transformed to IB or remain silent. Taken together, this dissertation offers a micro-to-organization account of academic intrapreneurship, and contributes with process mechanisms that connect everyday work with organizational change.