The current study has its starting point of departure in a broader understanding of entrepreneurship, which acknowledges that new entrepreneurial opportunities can be recognised and pursued by individuals in different ways. Thus, it can be done by establishing new ventures or by identifying and developing such opportunities within existing organisations (Shane & Venkataraman, 2000). Irrespective of its form, entrepreneurship can be understood as a behavioural process, which implies that individuals, engaged in this process, are involved (alone or in teams) in a broad range of goal-oriented activities. Previous research in the stream, predominantly focusing on venture creation behaviours, recognises that entrepreneurs, through different learning experiences, develop knowledge enabling them to recognise and pursue entrepreneurial opportunities (Politis, 2005; Politis et al., 2019). This reasoning should be equally relevant to entrepreneurial behaviour of employees within existing organisations (Bosma et al., 2012). Entrepreneurial employees, who can also be referred to as intrapreneurs (Bosma et al., 2012), commonly demonstrate behaviours, which are similar to those of entrepreneurs, i.e., proactiveness, risk -taking, and innovativeness (Antoncic & Hisrich, 2003). These employees are expected to contribute most to the value creation in their employing organizations by acting at the organisational “frontier” and “not the core” (Antoncic & Hisrich, 2003). Such behaviours enable their employing organisations to “depa rt from the customary” (Antoncic & Hisrich, 2003).Intrapreneurs are viewed as exceptional learners (Lackéus et al., 2020), who learn from multiple sources (colleagues, partners, competitors and other stakeholders) as well as through multiple experiences (e.g., observing, doing, re-doing) (Lackéus et al., 2020). Further, several studies emphasize the importance of work -related contexts for developing of intrapreneurial behaviour of employees and suggest that both formal (Mustafa et al., 2018) and informal learning (Keith et al., 2016) opportunities at work play an important role in transforming relevant experiences into entrepreneurial knowledge and herewith shaping entrepreneurial behaviour of employees. At the same time, rigid organisational structures and cultures, certain types of work task design as well as job role clarity may also affect the process of “intrapreneurial” learning in existing organisations (de Jong et al., 2015). This indicates that intrapreneurial learning, being a form of entrepreneurial learning, may develop in a different, compared to entrepreneurial learning, way and, accordingly, have specific dimensions. However, previous research provides limited understanding of how entrepreneurial employees learn at their workplaces (Manuti et al., 2015) as well as where (e.g., within/outside organisational boundaries) (Manuti et al., 2015). The current study aims, via integration of entrepreneurial learning, entrepreneurship, intrapreneurship, and workplace learning literature to advance the current understanding of the role of workplace learning in developing entrepreneurial employees. In doing so, the study adopts a broad approach to defining workplace learning (Stern & Sommerlad, 1999), acknowledging that there exist different degrees of separation between ‘learning’ and ‘work’. Thus, this implies that learning activities can occur within and outside organisational boundaries, as well as they can be integrated with or disintegrated from working tasks and assignments (e.g., Galan, 2018).The study results suggest that intrapreneurial behaviours of employees appear to be the outcome of employees learning through their work tasks which have multiple roles in the process of such learning. First, through their work tasks employees in existing organisations are likely to be exposed to various learning opportunities (both within and outside organisational boundaries). Second, the work task–learning opportunity fit appears to increase the employees’ engagement in learning opportunities and, thus, trigger their pursuit. Finally, task novelty is suggested to moderate the relationship between the pursuit of learning opportunities by employees and developing by them intrapreneurial behaviours. 

The study contributes to the literature on entrepreneurial learning in existing organisations by clarifying the enabling role of work tasks in this process and incorporating two features of work tasks, namely their fit to learning opportunities and novelty. Future research is encouraged to incorporate other characteristics of work tasks, such as task variety, task complexity, task scope, task importance, task structuredness as well as empirically test newly established relationships.