In the context of the digital economy, implementing intrapreneurship is regarded as a vital strategic measure for large enterprises to exploit new market opportunities and maintain competitive advantage. Research has indicated that middle managers are the primary executors of intrapreneurship within large enterprises. The positive impacts of middle managers’ intrapreneurship on firms’ financial outcomes (e.g., sales, productivity, and business performance) have also been confirmed. However, the antecedents causing middle managers to behave entrepreneurially have not been extensively specified. The limited empirical studies generally regard the process of middle managers implementing intrapreneurship as passive and need to be stimulated. In fact, the essential characteristic of intrapreneurship is a type of proactive innovative activity in which individuals will take the initiative to take risks. Thus, it is necessary to systematically explore the behavioral strategies employed by middle managers to effectively manage their intrapreneurial activities. Boundary‐spanning search, which refers to a process through which individuals span organizational and technological boundaries to search and identify new knowledge and resource, may be beneficial for middle managers to engage in entrepreneurial behavior. However, little research has examined whether, how, and when boundary-spanning search to influence intrapreneurship of middle managers. Based on self-regulation theory of social cognitive perspective, this paper constructs a new model to explain the influence mechanism of boundary-spanning search on middle managers’ intrapreneurship. Specifically, we firstly examined whether boundary-spanning search, an effective way to acquire external knowledge, influences intrapreneurship of middle managers. Second, this paper examined the mediating effect of cognitive crafting in the relationship between boundary-spanning search and middle managers’ intrapreneurship based on self-regulation theory. Third, we further explore the moderating effect of executives’ sense giving on the relationships between boundary-spanning search, cognitive crafting, and then intrapreneurship of middle managers. Through a three-ware data collection process, this study obtained 271 valid questionnaires from 81 enterprises in Beijing, Jiangsu, Shanghai, and Guangdong. Subsequently, we used AMOS 22.0, SPSS 24.0, and Hayes’s PROCESS macro in SPSS Statistics 24. 0 to test the moderated mediation model which is constructed in this study. Results shows that boundary-spanning search is positively related to intrapreneurship of middle managers. We also find cognitive crafting partially mediates the relationship between boundary-spanning search and middle managers intrapreneurship. Moreover, executives’ sense giving moderates the relationship between boundary-spanning search and middle managers intrapreneurship, such that the positive relationship is stronger when executives’ sense giving is higher. This paper also finds the mediating effect of cognitive crafting between boundary-spanning search and middle managers intrapreneurship is prominent when the level of executives’ sense giving is higher rather than lower.