Page - 230 - in Digital Entrepreneurship - Impact on Business and Society

Like the role of intrapreneur, the role of the sponsor has been extensively dis- cussed in the literature on innovation and corporate entrepreneurship. Sponsors serve to ensure that the intrapreneurial projects they finance are legitimate and supported (e.g.Hayton andKelley2006).Theyhelp intrapreneurs togain access to any resources theyneed for their ventures (e.g.Day1994).Good sponsors are able todistinguish the real intrapreneurs from the ‘promoters’who lookand soundgood but fail to get the job done. Once they select an intrapreneur to support and trust, sponsorsprotect andcoach themonfuture strategies (GarudandVandeVen1992). This demands a lot of the sponsors’ time for each intrapreneur, so if many innovations are needed, as they are in today’s disruptive environment, many sponsors are needed to coach and protect the many intrapreneurs that drive those innovations. For this reason, it is important that executives delegate discretionary time and budget to lower-level managers so they can support the many needed intrapreneurs (Hayton andKelley 2006). 2.3 TheGrowthofDigital Transformation and Its Implications for Intrapreneurship Manyemergingdigital technologies are calledexponential because every fewyears their capabilities are doubled. Because they are rapidly becoming impactful, exponential technologies like the Internetof things (IoT), artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), 3D printing, robotics, and blockchain are creating many new opportunities inmost industries almost every year. IoT, for instance, opens up newpossibilities for product development, logistics, and improvedbusiness processes (Phaneuf 2020). IoTalsoprovides powerful tools for tracking the quality, the ownership history, and the social and environmental attributes of the supply chain. This might greatly increase the capacity of organi- sations to manage their supply chains and address the sustainable development goals set by theUnitedNations. AI enables users to process huge amounts of consumer data accumulated from various customer interactions to provide new and enhanced customer-centric insights, which are useful for idea generation, advertising, surveillance, and the inventionprocess (Newman2019).MachineLearning,a typeofAI, lowers thecosts of prediction and problem diagnosis, which are inherent to all business decisions (ForbesTechnologyCouncil 2019).Blockchainprovides access tovariousmarkets, smart contracts,finance innovation opportunities, and enhanced security and com- petitiveness strategies (OECD n.d.). However, these powerful exponential tech- nologies, despite their numerousbenefits,maycauseundesirable results. First, such exponential technologiesmight radically reduce consumer privacy and potentially induce totalitariancontrol throughenhancedsurveillancemechanisms.Second, they may also increase the criminals’ ability to conceal illegal activity and transfer the right to create money away from governments to private entities, which might significantly impact thedistributionofwealth.Bothof thesepossibilities comewith ethical and political issues that businesseswill have tomanage. Although digital transformation is currently impacting a large variety of busi- nesses, we have noticed a limited display of attention towards the role of digital Digital Intrapreneurship: The Corporate Solution… 237