Corporate entrepreneurship: exploiting technologies for innovation discovery and breakthrough

Entrepreneurship is an emerging field of research gaining more importance. Fostering corporate entrepreneurship is as important as developing entrepreneurs or technopreneurs. In This work, corporate entrepreneurship is defined as the ability to acquire the skills and tools to identify and tap on entrepreneurial opportunities in large organizations to deliver promising business outcomes and revenues despite rapidly changing business environment. Three enterprising practices, namely knowledge sharing, knowledge continuity and knowledge mining, are desirable to foster corporate entrepreneurship. Knowledge mining is particularly important as it could lead to new business opportunity identification and problem solving. Organizations with the ability to leverage on IT to harness the power of corporate entrepreneurship are value-add to creating an entrepreneurial society. The Web technology (i.e., Internet and Intranet) is a good technology backbone to help enhance knowledge sharing and management. The speech and dialogue management technology is anticipated to facilitate knowledge mining. Organizations could leverage on these technologies to foster corporate entrepreneurship. This work introduces the extensible enterprise voice portal rapid application development (i.e., EVITA-RAD) tool. By tapping on speech applications developed using EVITA-RAD, intrapreneurs could mine knowledge to solve problems, or generate innovative ideas for potentially value-adding entrepreneurial activities.