Designing Entrepreneurial Organizations
Because great companies are made by entrepreneurial people.
Designing Entrepreneurial Organizations
Because great companies are made by entrepreneurial people.
Unlocking Entrepreneurial Potential...
... and creating beautiful organizations?
At The BEE, we support companies in their transformation towards becoming truly entrepreneurial organizations.
We believe that real added value for stakeholders is created when people at every level of the organization show entrepreneurial behavior: being proactive, taking initiative, owning responsibility, spotting opportunities, and acting on them.
Entrepreneurial organizations are not only more resilient and productive, they also enhance stakeholder well-being.
In short, we help organizations grow into what we call beautiful organizations: vibrant, future-ready, and deeply human.
who are we?
Design-driven scholar practitioners
Design-driven scholar practitioners
Design-driven scholar practitioners
We are a collaborative network organization of design science researchers and practitioners, committed to making a positive impact in the swamp of organizational practice.
That’s why we don’t refer to ourselves as consultants, but as design-driven scholar-practitioners.
In addition to our research backgrounds, most of us have either held
We are a collaborative network organization of design science researchers and practitioners, committed to making a positive impact in the swamp of organizational practice.
That’s why we don’t refer to ourselves as consultants, but as design-driven scholar-practitioners.
In addition to our research backgrounds, most of us have either held management positions in organizations or continue to serve as leaders within the academic world. We understand what it takes to support meaningful behavioral change toward organizational goals: not in theory, but in the realities of day-to-day practice.
Our core value
Design-driven scholar practitioners
Design-driven scholar practitioners
We are deeply committed to The BEE’s mission of creating more beautiful organizations where productivity growth goes hand in hand with employee wellbeing.
For us, the entrepreneurial organization is a place where it’s good to work.
Companies may pursue many different strategies, but we choose to work only with those willing to embrace the
We are deeply committed to The BEE’s mission of creating more beautiful organizations where productivity growth goes hand in hand with employee wellbeing.
For us, the entrepreneurial organization is a place where it’s good to work.
Companies may pursue many different strategies, but we choose to work only with those willing to embrace the journey toward becoming an entrepreneurial organization
And that means accepting the inherent tension between performance and wellbeing as a creative, necessary polarity.
Loyal contrarians
Design-driven scholar practitioners
Loyal contrarians
We are not a boutique organization only because we choose to work exclusively with managers who embrace the principle of a beautiful organization.
Our uniqueness also lies in how we interact with those managers.
We support managers in a contrarian way: by holding up a mirror, offering honest feedback, informed by science but always grounde
We are not a boutique organization only because we choose to work exclusively with managers who embrace the principle of a beautiful organization.
Our uniqueness also lies in how we interact with those managers.
We support managers in a contrarian way: by holding up a mirror, offering honest feedback, informed by science but always grounded in the unique context of the organization.
We challenge assumptions not for the sake of being difficult, but out of loyalty to the shared ambition of building organizations that truly work.
And that means we must do this together with courageous, entrepreneurial leaders who are willing to challenge their own thinking and create a psychologically safe environment in which all employees have the space to act entrepreneurially.
what do we do ?
Entrepreneurial leadership development
In these uncertain times, a manager should therefore develop into an entrepreneurial leader. This is not a new leadership style, but rather a strategic capability.
Such a leader not only deepens their own entrepreneurial actions, but also improves and accelerates decision-making, strengthens entrepreneurial behavior within teams, promotes open dialogue across departments and projects, creates room for loyal dissent, and makes decisions aligned with a clear collective ambition.
Yet entrepreneurial leadership within companies is far from self-evident. As Andy Grove, co-founder of chip manufacturer Intel, once said: “Success can trap you. The more successful we are as a microprocessor company, the more difficult it will be to become something else.” Too often, managers participate in inspiring seminars and workshops where they advocate entrepreneurial behavior and innovation, but once back in everyday reality revert to a “stick to your core tasks” mindset, leading to little entrepreneurial behavior or innovation in practice.
To support managers in embracing entrepreneurial leadership, The BEE together with academic partners is designing a unique learning community.
This is not a traditional knowledge platform, but an active environment for where senior managers from large companies and organizations can sharpen their entrepreneurial leadership by learning from each other.
All of this takes place in a psychologically safe environment that offers inspiration and concrete tools to take action within their own organizations.
Learning that changes how people lead, work, and create value where it matters most: on the job.
We design multi-layered learning pathways that strengthen entrepreneurial learning at the level of individuals, teams, and the wider organization.
These are not one-off training sessions, but ongoing development processes embedded in everyday work and aimed at sustainable behavioral change.
Crucially, they are built to solve the transfer problem: moving learning beyond insight into consistent action on the job.
Many organizations still struggle to turn training into better performance. The OECD’s Trends in Adult Learning: New Data from the 2023 Survey of Adult Skills (2025) underscores why: participation in adult learning remains low and uneven, investments skew toward initial education, and too much training is reactive and compliance-driven rather than preparing people with transferable skills for future roles.
Our pathways are explicitly designed to bridge this gap. We activate transfer by aligning learning with real work, by coaching deliberate practice on authentic tasks, and by cultivating self-regulated learning so participants plan, execute, monitor, and refine their development with ownership.
In practice, participants learn in the flow of work, supported by timely, formative feedback and guided reflection. Deliberate practice turns critical moments on the job into repeatable learning loops; self-regulated learning builds the metacognitive muscle to sustain progress beyond the program. To ensure learning scales beyond the individual, we use a longitudinal online feedback and learning system that makes growth visible over time and surfaces organizational conditions that either enable or hinder entrepreneurial action. This way, development becomes a shared organizational effort, not just a personal one.
The result is learning that transfers: people act with initiative under uncertainty, teams collaborate across boundaries to solve real problems, and organizations become more adaptive, innovative, and aligned around a clear shared ambition. Not compliance training. Not inspiration without follow-through.
Enhancing entrepreneurial work design within organizations
Entrepreneurial organizations are those that, through the design of work, incorporate a set of smart entrepreneurial work characteristics that enable and reinforce entrepreneurial behavior and learning among both leadership and employees. This, in turn, supports and strengthens both productivity growth and employee wellbeing.
We have designed the Entrepreneurial Work Design (EWD) model, which includes higher-order entrepreneurial work characteristics that help realize productivity and wellbeing by activating psychologically meaningful states.
When work is designed to include these characteristics, it fosters entrepreneurial behavior and learning at the individual level, while also promoting entrepreneurial behavior at the organizational level.
Why would you bother as a senior manager?
With the exponential growth of robotics and artificial intelligence, the key challenge in the labor market is no longer about quantity, but about quality. As Rudy Moenaert and Henry Robben assert in The Customer Leader: 'The old adage that people are a company’s most important asset is incorrect. People are not your most important asset. The right people are.' (p.185)
We believe that sustainably successful companies distinguish themselves by being agile, encouraging innovation and creating a culture in which employees take responsibility. This is only possible if entrepreneurial behavior is structurally embedded in the organization.
This is our definition of what a truly entrepreneurial organization is: an organization where every employee demonstrates entrepreneurial behavior at their own level of complexity and thus contributes in a unique way to the organization’s strategy and objectives.
Entrepreneurial behavior is a way of thinking and acting that can (and should) be present in every employee and layer of an organization. It is about seeing opportunities, making smart choices and taking action to generate value for all the stakeholders of the company.
Common misconceptions held by senior management?
Not for every employee!
A first misconception is that entrepreneurial behavior is reserved for managers and/or professionals working in specific departments such as R&D. In reality, entrepreneurial behavior can emerge across the organization, in functions with varying tasks and roles, and at different levels of decision-making complexity. Opportunity detection and creation can occur in the context of quality improvement, where employees reflect on how to add value for stakeholders within the scope of their everyday work. This ranges from small process enhancements to full-fledged business innovation.
However, employees often have more entrepreneurial potential than management tends to assume—regardless of their current roles. Take the example of Gillis Lundgren, a young employee at IKEA in 1956. When he couldn't get his Lövet coffee table into his car, he unscrewed the legs out of sheer frustration. That frustration became an idea: what if furniture could be sold as self-assembly kits? It wasn't an R&D manager or product developer who came up with this concept-it was an ordinary employee with a keen eye for opportunity AND an employer who was willing to listen. The idea transformed not only IKEA, but the entire furniture industry.
If you'd like to test this within your own organization, simply ask your employees about their hobbies. Suddenly, you’ll discover that machine operators are chairing local football clubs with over 100 members...
Not for a production environment!
Another common misconception is that the idea of an entrepreneurial organization is only relevant to professional services and not to manufacturing environments. In reality, the opposite is true. Entrepreneurial thinking can be just as valuable—if not more so—in production settings, where continuous improvement and innovation are key to staying competitive.
Entrepreneurial behavior is just as relevant in operational environments as it is in innovation processes. Consider the Toyota Production System (TPS), where employees constantly identify and eliminate inefficiencies to maximize value. This would be impossible without a proactive, problem-solving mindset.
Entrepreneurial employees will leave!
Another misconception is that entrepreneurial behavior leads to stress and that employees will leave once they develop their entrepreneurial spirit. However, research shows that entrepreneurial employees just become more loyal and productive when given the space to realize their ideas within their organization. Entrepreneurship does not mean "more work" or "turmoil"-it means more autonomy, commitment and satisfaction.
What is our unique approach?
A safe-to-fail, design science research informed methodology
Designing an entrepreneurial organization is, at its core, about changing leadership and employee behavior.
Research shows that leadership and employee behavior is a function of both individual factors—such as personality traits, ability, and motivation—and the organizational context in which individuals are embedded. These individual characteristics and the surrounding context continuously influence one another, ultimately shaping entrepreneurial organizational behavior that contributes to the collective ambition and strategic goals of the organization.
Unfortunately, managers often tend to approach such transformation processes in a highly top-down and heavily planned manner. Yet we know that organizations are complex entities that must adapt and evolve within equally complex environments. Large-scale, traditional change programs typically result in frustration for both managers and employees—and as a result, the idea of becoming an entrepreneurial organization is often prematurely abandoned.
In the ‘swamp of practice’, we have developed a safe-to-fail, scientifically informed methodology that supports both large and small companies in their transformation toward becoming entrepreneurial organizations.
The underlying scientific paradigm is a design science methodology, driven by two core principles: intentionality and contextuality. This means that your strategy and your organizational context—where your employees operate—are both the starting point and the guiding direction of the journey we co-create with your leadership team. No top-down, one-size-fits-all consultancy imposed from the outside.
