Intrapreneurship, initiatives for rejuvenating smes: A case study in medium scale manufacturing industry in Sri Lanka

The concept of intrapreneurship was evolved from the North American business lexicon and it has become a fast- growing concept in the organizational growth. Successful intrapreneurship in an organization, enables a unique competitive advantage to the small and medium scale manufacturing enterprises. Innovation, strategic renewal and ventures are the main focused fields of the intrapreneurship orientation that foster organizational growth. SMEs are developing sector under a huge number of constraints in Sri Lanka. Intrapreneurship is more visible in manufacturing SMEs than the large organization which is needed to be properly identified. As a result, studying on intrapreneurship has become a growing field of interest during the past three decades. Therefore the case study conducted on indentifying intrapreneurship skills and behaviour in a medium scale polymer based products manufacturing organization in Sri Lanka. The purpose of this paper is to review the literature along with empirical evidence to understand the concept of intrapreneurship and development within the manufacturing organization. The paper examines intrapreneurial orientation and three complexities of antecedents individual, organizational and environmental on the development of intrapreneurship within the context of the manufacturing organization. The study was focused only on middle and upper echelons of the organization where the intrapreneurship is prominent for primary data collection and secondary data collected from the organizational artifact and published documents for ensuring the performances. The author further proposes few propositions at the end for the purpose of future researches.