Individual entrepreneurial orientation and intrapreneurship in the public sector

Municipalities and Cities are facing a strong pressure to digitalize and develop themselves into Smart Cities. This article investigates the relationship of Individual Entrepreneurial Orientation (IEO) and individual-level exploration and exploitation activities to analyze a municipality’s ability to discover potentially important technologies and innovations. Moreover, the influence of self-regulatory modes is used to provide more insights into this relationship. For this, an online survey with 266 municipality and city employees in the German-speaking realm has been carried out. Our results show that employees with a high level of IEO are more likely to work on explorative activities which are the foundation for every intrapreneurial process ,whereas IEO does not seem to have an influence on exploitative activities. Locomotion as a moderating variable has a positive effect on the IEO exploration relationship. Therefore, employees with a high level of IEO and locomotion are more likely to discover new opportunities as they are working on explorative activities. Furthermore, our results show that the self-regulatory mode assessment affects the exploitative activities positively. The final findings suggest that municipalities that want to engage in intrapreneurial activities should start hiring people with a high level of IEO.