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Guiding through the Fog
(2021)
Corporate Entrepreneurship (CE) programs are formalized efforts to realize entrepreneurial activities in established companies. Despite the growing and evolving landscape of CE programs, effectively managing them remains a challenging endeavor which results in disappointing outcomes and oftentimes leads to the early termination of such programs. We unmask the differences in goal setting of CE programs and highlight that setting appropriate goals is imperative for their desired outcomes. In practice, companies seem to struggle with the goal setting, and scholars have not yet fully solved the puzzle of goals setting in the context of CE programs either. Therefore, we set out to explore the current state of goal setting in the context of CE programs building upon 61 semi-structured interviews with CE program executives from cross-industry companies with different sizes. Our study contributes to a better understanding of goal setting in the context of CE programs by (1) characterizing the goal setting of CE programs based on goal attributes and goal types and (2) identifying differences among the goal setting of CE programs. We provide implications to practice for a more effective management of CE programs and conclude with a discussion for future research on the impact of the different goal settings.
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.
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.
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.
