Questions

Questions

Question 1:

Entrepreneurship - public sector and private sector

“Entrepreneurship is often hailed in the public sector as a means of achieving more efficient, flexible and adaptable management in a turbulent and competitive environment” (Boyne, 2002 pp.56-70).

This should lead to innovations in the management in the public sector. This innovative activity is critical in the successful development of these organizations, as well as meeting the needs and aspirations of the public sector clients. Innovative public managers are entrepreneurial: they take risks … with an opportunistic bias towards action and a conscious underestimating of bureaucratic and political obstacles their innovations face. Although risk taking decisions are not always desirable in the public sector, public organizations need to encourage risk taking behavior since their policy environment is never entirely predictable and stable (Ford Foundation, 1996).

The Government needs to promote “prudent risk taking” and “experimenting” by providing room for failure, in order to pull public officials out of routines and encourage proactive actions to solve problems.

Innovation, risk taking and proactivity have been strongly recognized in private sector entrepreneurship literature as key dimensions that determine an entrepreneurial organization. These three dimensions have been referred to in the literature as entrepreneurial orientation. The salient dimensions of an entrepreneurial orientation emerge as a major construct in the entrepreneurship literature. Entrepreneurial Orientation is a strategic construct whose conceptual domain includes certain firm-level outcomes and management-related preferences, beliefs, and behaviors as expressed among a firm's top-level managers. While these three key dimensions can vary independently from one another, they typically convey the presence of organizational-level entrepreneurship(Boyne, 2002). Eentrepreneurial label is most defensible as a descriptor of established firms when those organizations are simultaneously risk taking, innovative and proactive with respect to their overall business operations, product offerings and technologies, and interactions with competitors. These behavioral tendencies are encapsulated within a variable as the “entrepreneurial posture”. Entrepreneurial posture is considered to directly influence organizational performance and in turn is influenced by environmental characteristics, the business and mission strategies of the organization, and organizational variables such as resources and competencies, structure, culture and top management values.

Innovation: Innovation refers not only to the opening of new markets - it can also refer to new ways of serving established and mature ones. Innovativeness reflects a tendency to support new ideas, novelty, experimentation, and creative processes, departing from established practices and technologies. Innovation can lead to the development of key capabilities that can improve the firm's performance(Bozeman, 1998). Innovation can improve the firm's profitability and fuel its growth. Innovativeness in the public sector will tend to be more concerned with novel process improvements, new services, and new organizational forms. Therefore, both public and private sector innovation needs to be encouraged and facilitated through new ideas and the creative process that enhance efficiency and effectiveness within the organization(Bozeman, 1998).

Private and Public Sectors IT Development

IT Development is the most important difference between these two sectors. The public sector appears to trail behind the private sector in IT development and implementation, not to mention ...