As a notion entrepreneurship has been extensively dealt with in French-speaking research on management during the 1990s. Many studies focused on business creation but entrepreneurship may be considered more generally as the active pursuit of new opportunities. We have chosen this approach which is supported by research work on `corporate entrepreneurship' so as to show that SMEs in the process of building up a framework for their activity can still follow an entrepreneurial orientation. In order to check on this hypothesis, we have carried out an empirical study of a number of SMEs. We have distinguished two categories of businesses by assessing their commitment to an entrepreneurial orientation and we have highlighted significant differences between these firms as far as their organizational structure is concerned.
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