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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.
Forschungsfrage: Welche Rollen lassen sich in Corporate Entrepreneurship identifizieren? Wie unterscheiden sich diese anhand verschiedener Merkmale und welche Fähigkeiten scheinen besonders relevant für ihre erfolgreiche Ausführung?
Methodik: Explorative Studie mit 56 semi-strukturierten Interviews mit Corporate-Entrepreneurship-Aktivitäten im DACH-Raum
Praktische Implikationen: Ein genaues Verständnis über die jeweiligen Rollen, ihre Unterschiedlichkeiten und Anforderungen ist notwendig, um die verschiedenen Corporate-Entrepreneurship-Aktivitäten mit passendem Personal zu besetzen.
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.
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.