ABSTRACT
This chapter explores with how organisations build a culture of entrepreneurship in practice. It draws upon a series of interviews with Jim Crilly, Senior Vice President for Research at Unilever, in which he shared his personal views of the leadership and culture required to stimulate entrepreneurship within large organisations. The chapter explains how Unilever identified the need for a change in culture to revitalise the business and the structural changes and new recruitment and reward practices it introduced to stimulate this change. It highlights the role of leadership in nurturing and supporting entrepreneurship and summarise how Unilever addressed innovation challenges to embed entrepreneurship as 'the way things are done around here' across different functions and geographic regions. In order for entrepreneurship to be present, then, business leaders of Unilever found that they had to overcome the paradox of managing entrepreneurship, dealing with 'loose-tight management'.
