Telepreneurship : Strategic bliss

Sammanfattning: The strategic management literature indirectly considers entrepreneurship as a subset of strategy, and the historical evolution of the field, specifically that of the Entrepreneurship division of the Academy of Management. Schendel (1990) which placed great emphasis on the topic of entrepreneurship and admitted that some argue that entrepreneurship is at the very heart of strategic management. This thesis explores the strategic use of entrepreneurship in the telecommunication industry. Through the use of strategic entrepreneurship theories both from the strategy and entrepreneurial fields provide the thesis with a foundation to explore and extract empirical results from two case samples known as Vox telecom and Telkom limited. Through an Interpretivist research design which includes thirty interviews in three different phases resulted in the empirical primary data for analysis. The research approach was carried out through an adaptive GT (Grounded Theory) technique which allowed the thesis to capture industry and organisational specific behaviours. The adaptive GT resulted in open, axial and selective coding which finally represented three themed domains. The domains include: the environmental, innovation and corporate orientation domain. The adaptive GT results were conducted through eighteen steps which finally represented three cycles. Chapter 6 represent the first cycle, which demonstrate the analysis and result of the primary data which was gathered during the 1st interview phase, mostly collecting entrepreneurial management practises while the 2nd interview phase represent the strategic organisational empirical findings. The result mainly describes the telecom industry through the scope of the two organisations in our sample, namely Telkom and Vox telecom in South Africa. The second cycle demonstrates the analysis and results which ultimately described the thesis knowledge contribution. The result is displayed and demonstrated in Chapter7 as the Telepreneur framework. The Telepreneur framework includes three models, namely the Telenetwork, Technovation and Telepreneurship model. Finally, in Chapter8 we attempt to test the formulated Telepreneur framework. This chapter represent the third cycle in which describes the result and analysis of the tested Telepreneur framework. The testing is conducted through evaluating the Telepreneur framework in the telecom industry through the third interview phase. The testing processes use two sets of survey data therefore quantitatively testing the result against specified industry data to further generalize the Telepreneur frame. In the end the outcome demonstrated a positive correlation regards the suggested formulated findings grounded in theory verses the empirical testing of the two sample cases and secondary survey data.