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—places where productivity growth goes hand in hand with employee wellbeing.
For us, the entrepreneurial organization is a powerful pathway to building such beautiful workplaces—places where it’s good to work.
Companies may pursue many different strategies
We are deeply committed to The BEE’s mission of creating more beautiful organizations—places where productivity growth goes hand in hand with employee wellbeing.
For us, the entrepreneurial organization is a powerful pathway to building such beautiful workplaces—places 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—one that accepts 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 grounded
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—for people and for performance.
And that means we must do this together with courageous, entrepreneurial managers—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.
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.
what do we do ?
Entrepreneurial leadership development
Entrepreneurial behavior within an organization does not arise naturally. It requires vision and strategy, entrepreneurial work design, above all, leadership. A corporate culture in which employees dare to seize opportunities and take responsibility can only grow if all management promotes the same values.
Leaders play a crucial role here. They must not only set the strategy, but also create the mindset and culture in which entrepreneurship can flourish. This means:
-Promoting opportunity creating and detecting behavior.
-Providing room for initiative and experimentation without fear of failure.
- Actively listening to employees and taking ideas seriously.
- Investing in entrepreneurial self-regulated learning.
To support managers in embracing entrepreneurial leadership, The BEE has designed a unique learning community. This is not a traditional knowledge platform, but an active environment for learning and experimentation—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.
Catalyzing entrepreneurial learning in organizations
Entrepreneurial learning is essential for sparking sustainable, long-term entrepreneurial behavior within an organization. However, this learning does not take place solely at the individual employee level. Entrepreneurial learning has a multi-level impact.
At The BEE, based on our work in the swamp of practice across various companies, we have developed an Integrated Entrepreneurial Learning Impact Model. This model enables us to design complex L&D interventions that go beyond merely developing entrepreneurial competencies at the individual level. It also fosters learning at the organizational level and contributes to sustaining the organization as a Complex Adaptive System (CAS).
We support L&D managers in step-by-step designing learning interventions that generate impact across multiple levels. In doing so, we activate the organization’s capability to evolve into an entrepreneurial organization.
Importantly, Levels 3 and 4 of our Integrated Entrepreneurial Learning Impact Model explicitly link learning and development (L&D) to the redesign of work. This means that at The BEE, we simultaneously implement L&D interventions and adapt work design—always tailored to the organization’s current context and the entrepreneurial mindset of its employees. This integrated approach provides the greatest potential for achieving successful and sustainable behavioral and organizational change.
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 this dual outcome—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. The latter aligns with what has been described in the literature as a company’s ‘entrepreneurial orientation.’
