Towards Entrepreneurial Organization: From the case of Organizational Process Innovation in Naver

In order to survive in a rapidly changing environment, organizations must innovate constantly, and a lot of efforts have been made by academia and company executives to design organizations capable of such innovation. The purpose of this study was to explore the ways to design an organization that is constantly innovating through entrepreneurship while retaining its superiority as an existing company, by examining the case of Naver, which has been recently attracting much attention due to its organizational process innovation, such as the abolition of the position classification system and the introduction of the cell organization and company-in-company (CIC) system. Based on user-centered thinking, Naver has reorganized the organization in the direction of expanding its organization to expand the autonomy of the organization dedicated to services and individuals, thereby enabling more flexible and prompt responses and creating an environment for all members of Naver to engage in entrepreneurial activities. Providing entrepreneurial opportunities will not only increase the positive impact of a horizontal organizational structure on innovation, but will also increase the need for cooperation and the incentive to share knowledge, so it will become possible for employees to be motivated by reputation instead of formal evaluation. In addition, the investigation of the system, process, and culture of Naver showed that they are well suited for creating and realizing opportunities through reorganization of various kinds of knowledge. In particular, we examined the possibility that the mobility of organizational members will play the role of checking the negative effects of entrepreneurs on the organization, while the company-wide coordination function that can hinder creativity and autonomy is minimized, and considered organizational learning of entrepreneurship as a condition of corporate entrepreneurship. Finally, we examined the implications of Naver's organizational process innovation by comparing existing theories with Naver's organizational process innovation.