AEA RC T Registr y

The American Economic Association's registry for randomized controlled trials

Intrapreneurship refers to bottom-up entrepreneurial activities by employees in existing firms and is an important source of innovation and organizational growth. As intrapreneurship is typically not codified in job descriptions, firms largely depend on the willingness of employees to develop intrapreneurial ideas during their own personal time. This project will explore to what extent subtle non-monetary cues, commonly referred to as nudging, can be used to influence intrapreneurial behavior in a large corporation.

Using a randomized controlled trial, we allocate employees to different experimental conditions where ideas can be submitted to an innovation challenge for further support and development. In a 2x2 and a 1x3 design we randomly apply interventions with default options, peer effects and minority/majority social norms as nudges. We combine the experimental data with survey data, expert evaluations, corporate HR data and post-hoc data to examine the effect of corporate nudging on the number and quality of intrapreneurial activities from idea generation to market success.