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Alles digital – was nun?
(2018)
Beidhändig zum Erfolg
(2018)
The organizational capability to adapt to the fast and radical changes of market parameters becomes a prerequisite for companies’ long-term survival. In this context, organizational ambidexterity has gained much attention in research and practice. It is the capability to develop new businesses (exploration) while simultaneously optimizing the existing core businesses (exploitation). Established companies face several challenges in achieving this capability, as the underlying learning modes of exploration and exploitation are mutually incompatible. One way to solve these challenges is to separate the exploration-oriented part from the core organization. Corporate venturing has been widely recognized as one tool to create these dual structures to develop new businesses, based on discontinuous innovation. In recent times, new corporate venturing forms emerge in practice. This growing number of different forms has led to new applications of corporate venturing which go beyond the pure development of new businesses, toward supporting the entrepreneurial transformation of companies. This study aims at answering how different corporate venturing forms contribute to the strategic renewal of established companies. For this purpose, qualitative research methods are used to analyze data from 17 interviews conducted in two German high-tech companies. The study at hand provides empirical evidence in the field of corporate venturing by uncovering new insights about the different transformational effects of corporate venturing initiatives on the core organization. It further reveals that corporate venturing forms can be classified into two categories according to their respective level of entrepreneurship and frequency of execution. Both categories exhibit different transformational effects and can be understood as being complementary to each other.
Uncertainty about the future requires companies to create discontinuous innovations. Established companies, however, struggle to do so; whereas independent startups seem to better cope with this. Consequently, established companies set up entrepreneurial initiatives to make use of startups' benefits. Consequently, this led-amongst others-to great interest in socalled corporate entrepreneurship (CE) programs and to the development and characterization of several different forms. Their processes to achieve certain objectives, yet, are still rather ineffective. Thus, considerations of the actions performed in preparation for and during CE programs could be one approach to improve this but are still absent today. Furthermore, the increasing use of several CE programs in parallel seems to bear the potential for synergies and, thus, more efficient use of resources. Aiming to provide insights to both issues, this study analyzes actions of CE programs, by looking at interviews with managers of seven corporate incubators and accelerator programs of five established German tech-companies.
Entrepreneurial employees
(2019)
Volatile markets and accelerating innovation cycles progressively force established companies to adopt alternative innovation strategies such as entrepreneurship. Due to the key role entrepreneurial employees play for strengthening the company's abilities for innovation and change, various concepts have emerged like corporate entrepreneurship or intrapreneurship. While the extant literature has increasingly examined only specific issues of entrepreneurial employees, an overall view on it lacks investigation. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to structurally present current research on entrepreneurial employees by conducting a broad systematic literature review. The resulting research streams contribute to a clearer justification for future research and are a first step towards a comprehensive research view related to intrapreneurship.
An inter- and transdisciplinary concept has been developed, focusing on the scaling of industrial circular construction using innovative compacted mineral mixtures (CMM) derived from various soil types (sand, silt, clay) and recycled mineral waste. The concept aims to accelerate the systemic transformation of the construction industry towards carbon neutrality by promoting the large-scale adoption and automation of CMM-based construction materials, which incorporate natural mineral components and recycled aggregates or industrial by-products. In close collaboration with international and domestic stakeholders in the construction sector, the concept explores the integration of various CMM-based construction methods for producing wall elements in conventional building construction. Leveraging a digital urban mining platform, the concept aims to standardize the production process and enable mass-scale production. The ultimate goal is to fully harness the potential of automated CMM-based wall elements as a fast, competitive, emission-free, and recyclable alternative to traditional masonry and concrete construction techniques. To achieve this objective, the concept draws upon the latest advances in soil mechanics, rheology, and automation and incorporates open-source digital platform technologies to enhance data accessibility, processing, and knowledge acquisition. This will bolster confidence in CMM-based technologies and facilitate their widespread adoption. The extraordinary transfer potential of this approach necessitates both basic and applied research. As such, the proposed transformative, inter- and transdisciplinary concept will be conducted and synthesized using a comprehensive, holistic, and transfer-oriented methodology.
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.
Corporate Entrepreneurship (CE) units have become an increasingly important part of established companies’ development activities enabling them to also create more discontinuous innovations. As a result, companies have developed and implemented different forms of CE units, such as corporate accelerators, incubators, startup supplier programs, and corporate venture capital. Driven by the need to innovate, companies have even begun to use multiple CE units simultaneously. However, this has not been empirically investigated yet. Thus, with this study, we aim to shed some light on this by investigating the parallel use of multiple CE units in the German business landscape. We conducted an extensive desk research, combining, coding, and analyzing different sources. We found that 55 out of 165 large established companies have multiple CE units, which allowed us to characterize the parallel use and identify differences and similarities, e.g., in terms of industry, company size, and CE forms implemented. We conclude by presenting different implications for both practice and research and by pointing out directions for future research.
Research credits corporate entrepreneurship (CE) with enabling established companies to create new types of innovation. Scholars have focused on the organizational design of CE activities, proposing specific organizational units. These semi-autonomous units create a tense management situation between the core organization and its CE activities. Management and organization research considers control as a key managerial function for help. However, control has received limited research attention regarding CE units, leaving design issues for appropriate control of CE units unanswered. In this study, we link management control and CE to illustrate how control is understood in the context of CE. For this, we scanned the CE literature to identify underlying attributes and characteristics that allow specifying control for CE. We identified 11 attributes to describe control for CE activities in a first round and to derive future research paths.
Strategic renewal and the development of new types of innovation pose special challenges to established small and medium-sized companies. The paper at hand aims at answering the questions what the underlying mechanism of these challenges are and which approaches might help to properly counteracting them. This case study investigates the strategic renewal process and its corresponding interventions in a high-tech SME company during a four-year period. We analyse the findings in relation to existing frameworks for dynamic capabilities and strategic learning and provide new recommendations for practice and future research.
Times of high dynamic and growing new knowledge demand for entrepreneurial education and university engagement. Higher education institutions (HEIs) have established intensive knowledge and resources about entrepreneurial education and relating activities and formats over the last years. As smaller companies (SMEs) are increasingly experimenting with entrepreneurship, they seem to struggle with setting up entrepreneurial activities within their established corporate strategy and innovation structures. It is beneficial for them to collaborate with higher education institutions to minimize the risk and uncertainty associated with implementing entrepreneurship education (EE) and catch up with larger corporates. Further, research lacks a systematic characterization of EE activities in those companies and classification of collaboration formats. Therefore, this study uses qualitative research methods to analyze data from interviews conducted with two German SMEs. Our study contributes to a better understanding of EE in SME and respective HEI collaborations by (1) characterizing EE in SME and SME-HEI collaboration based on attributes and collaboration types defined by their locus of collaboration and intensity of knowledge inflow and (2) identifying differences among EE in SME and HEI. We provide implications to practice—corporate and university EE initiatives—for a more effective design and implementation of EE in SMEs and the SME-HEI collaborations themselves.
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.
Entrepreneurial motivations have become a frequently discussed topic in entrepreneurship research. However, few studies investigated entrepreneurs' motivation across gender and different venture types and tend to rely on surveys or case studies. By using a text mining approach, we investigate if there are differences between male and female entrepreneurs' motivation and if female entrepreneurs' motivation differs across different venture types. This text mining approach in combination with a qualitative content analysis was used to examine unique motivational data from 472 entrepreneurial projects from three different entrepreneurship support programs in Norway and Sweden. Findings suggest that motivation of female and male entrepreneurs differ only slightly, while motivation of female entrepreneurs differs according to the different venture types. We thus contribute to a better understanding of entrepreneurial motivation and to a better understanding of why female entrepreneurs start a business. This can, for instance, benefit the improvement of future female entrepreneurship support programs.
The business plan is one of the most frequently available artifacts to innovation intermediaries of technology-based ventures' presentations in their early stages [1]–[4]. Agreement on the evaluations of venturing projects based on the business plans highly depends on the individual perspective of the readers [5], [6]. One reason is that little empirical proof exists for descriptions in business plans that suggest survival of early-stage technology ventures [7]–[9]. We identified descriptions of transaction relations [10]–[13] as an anchor of the snapshot model business plan to business reality [13]. In the early-stage, surviving ventures are building transaction relations to human resources, financial resources, and suppliers on the input side, and customers on the output side of the business towards a stronger ego-centric value network [10]–[13]. We conceptualized a multidimensional measurement instrument that evaluates the maturity of this ego-centric value networks based on the transaction relations of different strength levels that are described in business plans of early-stage technology ventures [13]. In this paper, the research design and the instrument are purified to achieve high agreement in the evaluation of business plans [14]–[16]. As a result, we present an overall research design that can reach acceptable quality for quantitative research. The paper so contributes to the literature on business analysis in the early-stage of technology-based ventures and the research technique of content analysis.
Evaluation of tech ventures’ evolving business models: rules for performance-related classification
(2022)
At the early stage of a successful tech venture's life cycle, it is assumed that the business model will evolve to higher quality over time. However, there are few empirical insights into business model evolution patterns for the performance-related classification of early-stage tech ventures. We created relevant variables evaluating the evolution of the venture-centric network and the technological proposition of both digital and non-digital ventures' business models using the text of submissions to the official business plan award in the German State of Baden-Württemberg between 2006 and 2012. Applying a principal component analysis/rough set theory mixed methodology, we explore performance-related business model classification rules in the heterogeneous sample of business plans. We find that ventures need to demonstrate real interactions with their customers' needs to survive. The distinguishing success rules are related to patent applications, risk capital, and scaling of the organisation. The rules help practitioners to classify business models in a way that allows them to prioritise action for performance.
What drives entrepreneurial action to create a lasting impact? The creation of new ventures that aim at having an impact beyond their financial performance face additional challenges: achieving economic sustainability and at the same time addressing social or environmental issues. Little is known on how these new hybrid organizations, aiming for multiple impact dimensions, manage to be congruent with their blended values. A dataset of 4,125 early-stage ventures is used to gain insights into how blended values are converted into financial, social and environmental impacts, giving shape to different types of hybrid organizations. Our findings suggest new hybrid organizations might opt to sacrifice financial impact to achieve social impact, yet this is not the case when they aim to generate environmental or sustainable impact. Therefore, the tensions and sacrifices related to holding blended values are not homogeneous across all types of new hybrid organizations.
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.
The business model canvas (BMC) and the lean start-up manifesto (LSM) have been changing both the entrepreneurial education and, on the practical side, the mindset in setting up innovative ventures since the burst of the dot-com bubble. However, few empirical insights on the business model implementation patterns that distinguish between digital and non-digital innovative ventures exist. Connecting practical management tools to network theory as well as to the theory of organizational learning, this paper investigates evolution patterns of digital and non-digital business models out of the deal flow of an innovation intermediary. For this purpose, a multi-dimensional quantitative content analysis research design is applied to 242 ventures' business plans. The measured strength of transaction relations to customers, suppliers, people, and financiers has been combined with performance indicators of the sampled ventures. The results indicate that in order to succeed, digital ventures iterate their business on the market early and search for investment afterwards. Contrariwise, non-digital ventures already need financial investments in the early stages to set up a product ready to be tested on the market. In both groups we found strong evidence that specific evolutionary patterns relate to higher rates of success.
Growth is a key indicator of the prosperity of an economy. In today's Germany the " Gründerzeit " still describes a period of enormous economic growth. Factors that lead to growth haven't been investigated in the context of the different life cycle stages of early-stage technology ventures so far. This paper proposes a model of early-stage ventures' growth based on factors. From a theoretical angle, we look at the business from the market-based view (MBV) and the resource-based view (RBV) on strategy in the longitudinal perspective of the business life cycle. With this view we get to know what are the stage specific needs and processes of new technology based ventures in order to provide appropriate support. We tested different potential growth indicators for the model with a questionnaire-based survey which was answered by 68 high-tech entrepreneurs. The results suggest that growth factors are stage specific in their relevance. While leading to growth in one stage, certain factors evince no or even negative influence on growth in other stages. Moreover, RBV factors as seen more relevant for the growth than the MBV factors. Further research requires a large and representative population to validate the results. Keywords:-growth factors, early-stage ventures, market-based view, resources based view.
Validity of the business model is a key indicator for buying into ventures in the early-stage. Business models of early-stage ventures decrease in validity when developing the business over the progressing stages of the business life-cycle. By doing so, the ventures are validating their business model when building transaction relationships to the surrounding value network. In prior research, we developed a research design based on existing business innovation proposals (onepager, pitch decks, business plans) that is assumed to evaluate the status of business model validation. The core hypothesis of the research design is that transaction relations represent a strong anchor between the business model and the business reality, thus providing information on the business model validity. In this research, we test this hypothesis by designing and analyzing a survey that was directed to founders taking part in a business plan competition. We compared the relationships described in the submitted business plans to the relations explicitely stated in the follow-up questionnaire. We identified that the described relations to customers, investors, and people (human resources) match the relationships expressed in questionnaires quite well. A significant disagreement, however, exists in the relationships to suppliers. We conclude that there is still a theoretical and empirical gap that leads to disagreement between business plans and reality in the group of suppliers.
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.
This paper builds upon the widely-used resource-based approach to explaining survival of new technology-based firms (NTBFs). However, instead of looking at the NTBF's initial resource configuration, a process-oriented perspective is taken by focusing on the entrepreneur's ability to transform resources in response to triggers resulting from market interactions. Transaction relations reflect these interactions and are thus operationalized with a suggested method for measuring the status of venture emergence (VE) applicable to early-stage NTBFs. NTBFs' value network maturity is reflected in the number and strength of their transaction relations 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 annotate and classify transaction relations from business plans in order to empirically determine NTBFs' status of VE. Results of the business plan analysis suggest that the level of transaction relations allows to draw conclusions on the VE status. Moreover, applying the developed process, first analysis of a business plan coding test shows that the transaction relation based VE status significantly relates to NTBF survival capability.