Employee engagement in internal corporate venture incubation : A case study on Ericsson ONE´s venture managers and entrepreneurs

Sammanfattning: This paper examines the pre-requisites for employees to go into corporate entrepreneurship and join an internal corporate incubator. It examines how intrinsic and extrinsic motivations relates to employees ideas on becoming corporate venture managers, and submitting innovative ideas to a corporate incubator. The research is carried out through examining a Swedish international telecom company and their employees. The focus has been on venture managers, that are driving corporate ventures in the internal corporate incubator at the moment and entrepreneurs that has been employed by the touched company, but started their own ventures or started working for startups. The research method used is qualitative interviews through online video calls. 10 employee venture managers have been interviewed and 5 entrepreneurs. The study finds that the most important thing when submitting an idea is that the venture manager believes that the idea will benefit from being developed internally and also that it is a need for a trust towards the organization and the incubator that is dependent on the organizational structure of decentralization of the corporate incubator. It has also found that venture managers change their view on what incentives that is important throughout the process, starting with intrinsic incentives going to extrinsic later in the process.