Executive summary

Innovation is the key to the creation of new wealth in our economy. Innovation drives employment growth, technological development, business rejuvenation and our global competitiveness . Innovations, in the form of new products, new services and new business models, are introduced by entrepreneurs, who may be self-employed or work for existing firms. Entrepreneurs thus add value to their firm and to society more generally .

Entrepreneurship is a behavioural pattern that is exhibited by managers, and depends upon their underlying entrepreneurial attitudes and entrepreneurial abilities . Within the organisation, entrepreneurial behaviour will be encouraged by the existence of an entrepreneurial culture. There is a virtuous circle of entrepreneurship, whereby entrepreneurial attitudes and abilities provoke entrepreneurial behaviours, those behaviours build an entrepreneurial culture, and that culture in turn reinforces and stimulates entrepreneurial attitudes and abilities, and so on.

This chapter examines the attitudes, abilities and behaviours of entrepreneurial managers, the concept of new business models and the inevitability of continually changing business models, and what it takes to develop an entrepreneurial culture.

The encouragement of entrepreneurship and the creation of an entrepreneurial culture within businesses and other organisations will enable these organisations to generate an ongoing flow of innovations. It will also encourage the managerial behaviour necessary to implement and sustain those innovations, and thereby ensure that the organisation survives and prospers.

Finally, this chapter explores a series of leadership behaviours that will serve to generate, nurture, facilitate, and reward innovations within the organisation, whether it be public or private, large or small, and new or established.