Intrapreneurship in Higher Education: The Digital Learning Challenge

Digital learning is challenging traditional higher education structures by enabling new strategic directions and entrepreneurial stimuli. The paper adopts the definition of intrapreneurship as the entrepreneurial orientation within existing organisations and explores that concept in the context of digital learning, focusing on Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). The three stages of intrapreneurship–formulation, deployment and evaluation–were explored through a multiple case study, alongside the duality between individual freedoms and organisational goals and constraints. Detailed results show the interaction and conflicts arising during the three stages of intrapreneurship, providing a framework of reference. The paper offers management and policy implications in the designing and monitoring of these organisational processes.