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Nowadays established companies use Corporate Entrepreneurship (CE) as a means to create discontinuous innovations. Many companies thereby even implement multiple CE units that typically involve several entrepreneurial activities. This explorative study aimed to identify the reasons why established companies implement multiple CE units concurrently. In conducting a comparative case study with eight companies from different industries, valuable insights for science and practice were gained. We provide an overview of different 11 reasons for implementing multiple CE units. This shows that the combination of CE units used by companies differs depending on the reason. It further allowed to derive general approaches of established companies to the implementation of CE units. Last, we identify the concept of co-specialization to be a central driver explaining the creation of the need to set up multiple units. We conclude by indicating implications and subjects for future research.
Corporate Entrepreneurship (CE) has now evolved into an imperative innovation practice of established companies. Despite organizational design models for CE activities and companies' frequent initiation of new activities, effectively managing them remains a challenging endeavor which results in disappointment about the outcomes of CE and its early termination. We assume specific types of goals for CE as one element of this unresolved management issue. While both practice and literature address goals in different contexts, no uniform picture has emerged so far. Although goals are commonly used to categorize CE activities, they seldomly seem to be the core subject of investigation. Based on this preliminary analysis and consolidation, we put the goals of CE in focus. In a systematic literature review, we reveal aspects of goals to unmask the different types of goals and their underlying dimensions and characteristics. Our review contributes to a better understanding of goals by (1) organizing relevant literature on goals of CE in a specific classification process, (2) describing dimensions and attributes for a systematic classification of CE goals; and (3) providing a framework showing differences of goals for the CE context. We conclude with a discussion and hints for future research paths.
Corporate entrepreneurship (CE) is experiencing continuously increasing interest from scholars and practitioners. One reason for this seems to be rooted in the organizational structures of established companies, which are cumbersome for implementing organizational agility and for developing radical innovations. In view of the advancing digitalization, however, exactly this is required in order to be successful in the long-term. CE is a promising managerial tool that offers a wide range of options to pursue the creation of new businesses and to support the companies' transformation in order to adapt to changes in the environment. Even though CE offers a broad range of opportunities, the effective management is a challenge. One reason for this is the ambiguity when it comes to the differences between the various CE forms and the objectives that can be achieved by those. This study, which is based on 13 in-depth interviews from eight high-tech companies, contributes to a better understanding of CE by offering a first harmonized set of CE objectives that is suitable to compare and differentiate across the different forms. In addition to that, three CE types, offering a new perspective on how to differentiate CE forms, are identified and give implications for a more effective management.
Think BIQ: Gender Differences, Entrepreneurship Support and the Quality of Business Idea Description
(2023)
Entrepreneurship support, its influencing factors and female entrepreneurship are recently discussed topics with great relevance for society and politics. However, research on the subject has been divergent in its results and lacks a focus on the impact of support programs’ characteristics concerning different types of entrepreneurs. Thus, we conduct a fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis on entrepreneurship support characteristics aiming to shed light on possible gender differences occurring in respective programs. We investigate the quality of business idea descriptions, as a predecessor for a high-potential business model, operationalized using inter alia causation and effectuation theory and social role theory as possible explanations. In our fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis on a sample of 911 Norwegian ventures, we find a variety of differences related to the entrepreneurs’ gender. For instance, that financial support combined with a well described key contribution or careful planning seem to be more important antecedents for female entrepreneurs’ business idea quality than for males. Moreover, it seems a well-described key contribution has a positive effect on the outcome variable in most cases. Another interesting finding concerns the entrepreneurs’ network partners, where we found evident gender differences in our combinations. Female entrepreneurs seemingly benefitted from rather small networks, and males from big networks, although the former possess larger networks in the sample. In conclusion, we find that gender differences in combinations of entrepreneurship support for high business idea quality still occur even in a country like Norway, calling for an adaption of the provided support and environment.
The Role of Support-Activities for the successful Implementation of Internal Corporate Accelerators
(2018)
Business coaching is believed to effectively improve survival and success chances of new technology-based firms (NTBFs). However, not much empirical evidence on the support measure's effectiveness is available. Therefore, a pragmatic two-armed Randomized Controlled Trial (RCT) to test the effect of tactical business coaching on NTBF survival capabilities was designed and, for the most part, carried out. However, due to a lower than expected sample size and great attrition between groups, the RCT reveals deviations from the trial design that impede a thorough data assessment. Based on the data given, a first data analysis does not reveal significant differences in survival capability between the two groups. Thus, to provide guidance for future RCTs in business contexts, lessons learned about how to deal with trickle samples and experiment constellations with third parties carrying out the intervention are drawn.
The corporate entrepreneur
(2016)
Corporate entrepreneurship is one tool for established companies to strengthen their capabilities for strategic renewal and innovativeness. The question, however, which factors are influencing the success of a corporate entrepreneurship initiative requires further attention. The corporate entrepreneur who is acting as both the leader of embedded entrepreneurial teams and linking pin to the corporate, is providing one possible perspective. Based on 6 interviews conducted in 6 German organizations this study contributes to the understanding of the role of the corporate entrepreneur and how this role can be distinguished from other roles in the context of innovation.
In today's volatile world, established companies must be capable of optimizing their core business with incremental innovations while simultaneously developing discontinuous innovations to maintain their long-term competitiveness. Balancing both is a major challenge for companies, since different types of innovation require different organizational structures, operational modes and management styles. Established companies tend to excel in improving their current business through incremental innovations which are closely related to their current knowledge base and competencies. However, this often goes hand in hand with challenges in the exploration of knowledge that is new to the company and that is essential for the development of discontinuous innovations. In this respect, the concept of corporate entrepreneurship is recognized as a way to strengthen the exploration of new knowledge and to support the development of discontinuous innovation. For managing corporate entrepreneurship more effectively, it is crucial to understand which types of knowledge can be created through corporate entrepreneurship and which organizational designs are more suited to gain certain types of knowledge. To answer these questions, this study analyzed 23 semi-structured interviews conducted with established companies that are running such entrepreneurial activities. The results show (1) that three general types of knowledge can be explored through corporate entrepreneurship and (2) that some organizational designs are more suited to explore certain knowledge types than others are.
Strategie der digitalen Ära
(2015)
Technology-based ventures provide an important route for successful technology transfer [1], [2]. Their founders are supported in successful technology commercialization by innovation intermediaries [3]. Accordingly, the performance of an innovation system, at least to some extent, depends on the efficiency of these intermediaries in terms of the impact of their scarce resources on the survival and growth of technology-based ventures. To increase their efficiency, intermediaries typically optimize their "intake" by requesting a formal business plan to base their selection on as a hygiene factor [4]-[7]. Thus, some scholars argue that written business plans show significant distortion as being produced only to attract support from innovation intermediaries [6], [8]. Accordingly, they rarely serve for these addressees as a source of information for analyzing the strengths and weaknesses of ventures, in order to derive actionable conclusions and more effectively support ventures [9], [10]. Addressees search for different indicators in business plans for their evaluation [11]. The descriptions of these indicators only evince little empirical proof for the performance of technology-based venture's [8], [12]. This gap is herein addressed, in contrast to the lacking empirical insight, as the most frequently produced artifact of early-stage technology ventures is at the same time a written business plan [10], [13]. This paper addresses this gap by conceptualizing transaction relations described in the written business plan as a means for working around the inevitable inaccuracies and uncertainties that delimit the explanatory abilities [14] of the snapshot model [10] presented by a business plan. Using a qualitative content analysis, we derive from the descriptions of transaction relations in a written business plan valid indicators for the maturity of the venture's value-network in different dimensions [15]. To this extent, this paper presents the findings from a pre-study that was conducted based on a sample of forty business plans from an overall population of 800 business plans in a longitudinal sample from one of Europe's most active innovation systems, the regional State of Baden-Württemberg. Such findings may be used by innovation intermediaries to enhance their efficiency, by enabling these to not only derive individual support strategies for business acceleration but also to analyze the impact of support measures by reliably monitoring maturity progress in venture activities.
We examine to what extent a transaction relation-based value network maturity status of New Technology-Based Firms (NTBFs) is related to their survival. A specific challenge of NTBFs is their lack of market-orientation, which is why the maturity of the ties they form towards the market in terms of customers, financiers, personnel and partners is supposed to be a strong indicator for survival. We analyze a sample of 170 NTBFs by capturing their value network status from business plans and defining their survival status using secondary research. Simple statistical tests and regressions suggest that the official registration of the business is a pre-step for survival that requires industry-specific value network dimension strengths. A sub-sample survival analysis shows that for all NTBFs that have reached registration, regardless of their industry, a stronger customer value network maturity dimension prevents from failure and is thus a significant predictor for survival. Moreover, the analyses partly support the idea that NTBFs from the IT sector are less dependent on a strong value network in the financier dimension to survive. The results are of relevance for both practitioners and researchers in the innovation system: a better understanding of the factors impacting on NTBF survival can help to provide more tailored support services for young firms, increase the effectiveness of resource allocations, and provide a basis for further research.
This paper broadens the resource-based approach to explaining survival of new technology-based firms (NTBFs) by focusing on the entrepreneur's ability to transform resources in response to triggers resulting from market interactions. Network theory is used to define a construct that allows determining the status of venture emergence (VE).The operationalization of the VE construct is built on the firm's value network maturity in the four market dimensions customer, investor, partner, and human resource. Business plans of NTBFs represent the artifact that contains this data in the form of transaction relation descriptions. Using content analysis, a multi-step combined human and computer coding process has been developed to empirically determine NTBFs' status of VE.Results of the business plan analysis suggests that the level of transaction relations allows to draw conclusions on the status of VE. Moreover, applying the developed process, a business plan coding test shows that the transaction relation based VE status significantly relates to NTBFs' survival capabilities.
We have analyzed a pool of 37,839 articles published in 4,404 business-related journals in the entrepreneurship research field using a novel literature review approach that is based on machine learning and text data mining. Most papers have been published in the journals ‘Small Business Economics’, ‘International Journal of Entrepreneurship and Small Business’, and ‘Sustainability’ (Switzerland), while the sum of citations is highest in the ‘Journal of Business Venturing’, ‘Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice’, and ‘Small Business Economics’. We derived 29 overarching themes based on 52 identified clusters. The social entrepreneurship, development, innovation, capital, and economy clusters represent the largest ones among those with high thematic clarity. The most discussed clusters measured by the average number of citations per assigned paper are research, orientation, capital, gender, and growth. Clusters with the highest average growth in publications per year are social entrepreneurship, innovation, development, entrepreneurship education, and (business-) models. Measured by the average yearly citation rate per paper, the thematic cluster ‘research’, mostly containing literature studies, received most attention. The MLR allows for an inclusion of a significantly higher number of publications compared to traditional reviews thus providing a comprehensive, descriptive overview of the whole research field.
Corporate Entrepreneurship (CE) became the new paradigm for organizations to cope with the accelerated development of innovations. Therefore, especially established organizations increasingly implement CE activities, even in combination. Scholars point out that a coordinated portfolio of CE activities could yield synergies and thus higher value for the organization and further call for more scientific examinations. This literature review aims to better the understanding of the combined and coordinated use of CE activities as well as about resulting synergies. Results show that there are only very few studies that addressed a combination and/or coordination of CE activities with respect to the creation of additional value, however, without empirical analyses. Yet, five categories of direct and indirect synergies could be derived. Discussing the results as well as the heterogenous use of terminology and concepts, this paper concludes with a research agenda for future analyses.