AN EMPIRICAL-COMPARISON OF ENTREPRENEURS AND EMPLOYEES - IMPLICATIONSFOR INNOVATION

Much has been written regarding the organizational changes needed to a chieve entrepreneurship in established companies. Many corporate strat egists conclude that above all others, afirm's ''rank and file'' have the intimate knowledge of business operations necessary to discover in novations within a corporation. However, little attention has been dev oted to discovering a measure to identify the employees within a corpo ration who possess entrepreneurial characteristics and are thus likely to produce innovations. This exploratory study used external entrepre neurs as proxies for corporate internal entrepreneurs. The purpose of this study was to examine the effectiveness of two measures: Kirton's Adaption-innovation Inventory (Kirton, 1976) and an adapted version of Rotter's Locus of Control Scale (Rotter, 1966) in distinguishing entr epreneurs from a population of employees. Participants (54 entrepreneu rs and 79 employees) completed the 2 measures. Results indicated some significant differences between entrepreneurs and employees. Implicati ons of the findings for research and practice are discussed.