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al to entrepreneurial action, albeit the individual may have held a long term desire to run his or her own business. Shapero and Sokol (1982) also believe that a deviation from an individual's established routines may trigger an entrepreneurial event. In Shapero and Sokol's 'model of the entrepreneurial event' (see below), the choice that an individual makes is seen to depend on three distinct elements, namely, how desirable the proposed behaviour is; the propensity to act on intentions; and how feasible the behaviour is perceived to be.

In this model, intentions are regarded as the single most significant predictor of entrepreneurial behaviour and help to explain, firstly, why many entrepreneurs make the decision to embark on a new venture some time before they start the process of seeking out actual market opportunities and, secondly, why entrepreneurs decide to expand their ventures at some future point. In terms of commercial entrepreneurship, this latter behavioural trait has been evidenced in a study carried out in the USA that examined over one hundred small businesses in terms of their growth intentions. The study concluded that a stated intention to grow, on the part of the owner-managers of the businesses, resulted in actual recorded growth over a four year period (Orser et al, 1998).

The banking industry is a good example of how entrepreneurship has successfully been applied in both the commercial and social sectors. Despite the popularly held belief that banks are relatively staid institutions, the global commercial banking industry has experienced dramatic change and innovation over the last thirty years. The advance in information technology has revolutionised both internal banking operations and the delivery of services to customers. The ability of commercial banks to demonstrate entrepreneurship through innovation, based on information technology, depends, to a large degree, on whether or not they have accumulated the necessary IT skills. Cohen and Levinthal (1989) refer to this accumulation of skills as 'absorptive capacity'. The more absorptive capacity a bank has then the less it has to rely on the knowledge and skills of others in order to innovate. One of the major IT led innovations in banking of the last twenty years has been direct banking i.e. banking that does not rely on branches to deliver customer services but rather deploys other channels, such as the telephone, for this purpose.

Founded in October 1989, First Direct was one of the earliest exponents of direct banking in the UK and was judged to have demonstrated entrepreneurial behaviour through innovation by a number of commentators following its launch in 1995 (Parmenter,1997;Tomkin, 1998). The then parent organisation, Midland Bank, used its absorptive capacity in IT to launch First Direct and by the middle of that year it became the UK's fastest growing bank, opening some 10,000 new accounts every month (Hamel, 1996). Midland Bank exhibited classic entrepreneurial behaviour when it planned the First Direct banking concept. This is evidenced by the fact that its launch was carefully researched and evaluated. The First Direct banking project, lead by the highly experienced banker Graham Picken, identified that bank customers were increasingly changing their behaviour and becoming more interested in banking services that were available remotely, 24 hours a d本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。