The impact of corporate entrepreneurship culture on the quality of interventions by market systems development organisations. a case of AgroBiz.

Abstract

Corporate entrepreneurship is the process by which organisations create value through introduction of new products, services or processes to ensure competitive advantage. Whilst entrepreneurship is such an important subject and crucial for organisational performance, most market systems development (MSD) organisations have not adopted an entrepreneurial posture in their quest to transform market systems to work better for the poor. The MSD programmes rely largely on the technical skills of staff within the Project Facilitation Unit (PFU) of development organisations. The objective of this study was to explore and understand the role and impact of corporate entrepreneurship in MSD organisations. The study was conducted at AgroBiz, in Mozambique. AgroBiz had a total of 20 employees (the population). Since the population size was small, a census survey technique was adopted for the quantitative study, followed by a snow ball volunteer sampling technique for the qualitative part of the study. The survey was conducted online using Google Forms and the qualitative study was undertaken using telephonic structured interviews. Data analysis was computed using Microsoft Excel and Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) and the results were presented in the form of charts, tables and figures. The qualitative part of the study was analysed using the Grounded theory method. It was found that the organisation had a mechanistic structure, characterised by bureaucracy and rigid decision-making control. Even though the level of entrepreneurship was 10 out of 15, other strategic factors such as resource (or capital) availability, leadership and management support and decision-making control were found to be the main barriers to entrepreneurial behaviours. It was recommended that the leadership ought to focus on addressing key variables that prohibit entrepreneurship. Future research should identify the key skills that are required by leadership to effectively develop an entrepreneurial team. There is also an opportunity for academics to identify whether the business model of MSD organisations influences how entrepreneurial the individual employees can be. Lastly, there is need to explore the Hoselitz’s theory further to understand the role of the individual’s socio-economic class on entrepreneurial behaviour.