Building an Inclusive Entrepreneurial Culture: Effects of Employee Involvement on Venture Performance And Innovation

The process through which entrepreneurial firms plan and achieve strategic growth and innovation often reflects a complex set of internal organizational challenges and opportunities. This paper specifically focuses on how entrepreneurs build internal cultures in order to stimulate and drive innovation and improve organizational effectiveness. Drawing upon both strategic-management and entrepreneurial-dynamics perspectives, the authors argue that sustained innovation requires moving beyond the characteristics of the entrepreneur towards an organization that will support a firm's growth by eliciting and directing additive contributions from the individuals working for these ventures. Results revealed that entrepreneurs were more likely to create high-performance and innovative ventures if they were able systematically to involve employees in the idea and opportunity-development stages of the firm. Implications for the strategic management of innovation in emerging entrepreneurial firms are further discussed.