The Challenges of Corporate Entrepreneurship in the Disruptive Age

Donald F. Kuratko, Sherry Hoskinson

• Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781787544451
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Entrepreneurship
• Index: Business

The new disruptive age in technology has presented a strategic game changer for most organizations. The severe modifications in complete industries and unpredictable market conditions have created significant challenges for simple organizational survival, let alone providing an avenue for growth, innovation, and new ventures. These conditions have fostered a greater need for corporate innovative activities and a better understanding of the corporate entrepreneurial process within such an environment.
This volume focuses on the greatest challenges that exist in Corporate Entrepreneurship in this disruptive age, and explores the complications posed by the dynamic environment that all organizations of today are forced to confront. It addresses the need for a better understanding of the role of external socio-cultural, economic and market conditions upon the managerial and leadership decisions and actions in pursuit of Corporate Entrepreneurship strategies.

CHAPTER 1

UNPACKING CORPORATE ENTREPRENEURSHIP: A CRITIQUE AND EXTENSION

Minet Schindehutte, Michael H. Morris and Donald F. Kuratko

ABSTRACT

The present study examines entrepreneurship in established firms holistically and critically. The authors start by reviewing previous research and highlight a variety of definitional, conceptual, methodological, contextual, and temporal factors that have been confounding the research. The authors then present a multidimensional framework that specifies a more nuanced picture of the determinants, motives, activities, and consequences of corporate in established firms. Finally, the authors discuss conceptual, methodological, and practical implications, as well as outline future research avenues.

Keywords: Corporate entrepreneurship; corporate venturing; entrepreneurial orientation; strategic entrepreneurship

INTRODUCTION

What are we talking about when discussing entrepreneurship within established firms? The answer to this question depends on whom you ask. In fact, Covin and Miles (1999, p. 47) lament,

there is no consensus on what it means for firms to be entrepreneurial. This situation is exacerbated by the proliferation of labels for entrepreneurial phenomena in organizations. Thus, when management theorists talk about corporate entrepreneurship, they are often talking about different phenomena.

Although they reached this conclusion nearly 20 years ago, it is as valid today as it was then.

Apart from different labels for what seems to be the same phenomenon (or part thereof), there is disagreement about the nature of corporate entrepreneurship (CE) and phenomena associated with it. Where some define CE in terms of attributes (Covin & Slevin, 1991; Stopford & Baden-Fuller, 1994), others associate it with different forms or types of activity (Covin & Miles, 1999; Guth & Ginsberg, 1990; Stopford & Baden-Fuller, 1994). Some scholars refer to CE as a process (e.g., Burgelman, 1983a; Guth & Ginsberg, 1990), while others treat is as a variable (Zahra, 1996). Some of the conceptualizations stress the key role of external factors such as opportunities (Stevenson & Jarillo, 1990), while others focus on internal factors such as the climate for entrepreneurship (Hornsby, Kuratko, & Zahra, 2002; Kuratko, Montagno, & Hornsby, 1990) or emphasize the role of individual(s) within the organizations (Ling, Simsek, Lubatkin, & Veiga, 2008).

Five terms are typically associated with entrepreneurship in established firms: CE, intrapreneurship, corporate venturing (CV), company entrepreneurial orientation (EO), and strategic entrepreneurship (SE). However, scholars often refer to these terms as if they are interchangeable. To complicate matters, there are also multiple and sometimes contradictory definitions for the same term. Thus, it is not clear what the relationships between these different terms are, or how they contribute (differently) to the firm’s outcomes. As a result, scholars operationalize constructs in an inconsistent manner, often (re)interpreting the constructs through their own disciplinary lenses, which in turn results in contradictory findings.

There is also a close relationship between CE and strategic management (Barringer & Bluedorn, 1999; Burgelman, 1983b). Meyer, Neck, and Meeks (2017) explain:

…scholars have been greatly focused trying to understand how opportunities to bring into existence future goods and services are discovered and exploited to create and grow new ventures. Strategic management researchers have been interested mostly in relatively large corporations. And entrepreneurship researchers have and continue to study mostly small and medium-sized enterprises.

These inconsistencies have resulted in a burgeoning number of studies without any real advancement of knowledge for scholars or practitioners. As the number of studies has grown, so has the number of interchanges and substitutions of different terms as scholars misinterpret and/or misquote seminal studies. Only one aspect has remained consistent. Most of the studies associate entrepreneurship in established firms with competitive advantage and superior financial performance (e.g., Covin & Miles, 1999; Zahra & Covin, 1995).

The primary motivation of the present study is to examine the relationship between different organizational phenomena associated with entrepreneurship in established firms. We contribute to the literature on CE in three primary ways. First, we promote CE as a field of research, rather than a construct. Thus, CE covers a broad spectrum of entrepreneurial phenomena in organizations. This helps to solve a number of problems with the current conflation of EO and CE. Contrary to previous claims that EO depicts “what it means to be entrepreneurial at the firm level” (Anderson, Kreiser, Kuratko, Hornsby, & Eshima, 2015, p. 1595), we show that EO captures a proclivity toward some of the ways a firm can behave entrepreneurially, and explore how it relates to CE.

Second, we develop a multidimensional framework that shows the relationships between different modes of CE, thereby extending and refining previous typologies (Guth & Ginsberg, 1990; Morris, Kuratko, & Covin, 2008). In addition, this framework organizes the modes of CE according to their role in CE as determinants, behaviors (or acts), activities (as processes versus outcomes), and consequences attributable to CE.

Third, we distinguish between the process orientation of CE and the outcome orientation of constructs such as EO. Stated differently, we shift the conversation about firm-level entrepreneurship from “having” an EO to “doing” entrepreneurship, thereby making a distinction between EO (static; a property) and CE (dynamic; involving processes).

The chapter proceeds as follows. We first review firm-level entrepreneurship studies to highlight definitional, conceptual, and contextual, temporal and methodological problems underpinning ongoing debates about the respective roles of entrepreneurial phenomena in CE. We then develop a multidimensional framework of entrepreneurship in established firms. Finally, we consider implications for research, theory development, and practice, with associated suggestions for future research.

ENTREPRENEURSHIP WITHIN ESTABLISHED FIRMS: A CRITICAL REVIEW

CE research is fraught with ambiguities, confusion, inconsistencies, compromised methodologies, and conflicting findings. Let us examine a number of conceptual, contextual, temporal, and methodological issues related to firm-level entrepreneurship research.

Conceptual Problems

The first problem of note centers on the ambiguous nature of CE. It is depicted as a firm’s entrepreneurial behavior (Moreno & Casillas, 2008), the entrepreneurial behaviors of managers (e.g., Stevenson & Jarillo, 1990), entrepreneurial behavior within the firm (Kellermanns, Eddleston, Barnett, & Pearson, 2008), entrepreneurship as firm behavior (Covin & Slevin, 1991), firm-level entrepreneurship (Morse, 1986), firm-level entrepreneurial behavior (Covin, Green, & Slevin, 2006), attributes of the entrepreneurial firm (Miller & Friesen, 1982), entrepreneurial initiatives (Birkinshaw, 1997; Simsek, 2007), entrepreneurial acts (Covin & Miles, 1999), and entrepreneurial activities of the firm (Jennings & Lumpkin, 1989; Kuratko et al., 1990). These are not semantic issues – an activity differs markedly from a behavior, act, initiative, or attribute. A closer examination of these studies makes it clear that the author(s) refer to very different phenomena. In general, entrepreneurial behavior would appear to describe EO, whereas entrepreneurial activities are associated with CE, although scholars are not consistent in this regard.

The second problem – of terminology – is a result of the large number (25 by our count) of different labels that scholars used to study firm-level entrepreneurship, as illustrated in Table 1. Some of the more popular terms include CE (Burgelman, 1990), intrapreneurship (Pinchott, 1...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction: The Challenges of Corporate Entrepreneurship in the Disruptive Age
• Chapter 1 Unpacking Corporate Entrepreneurship: A Critique and Extension
• Chapter 2 Entrepreneurial Orientation and Ambidexterity: Literature Review, Challenges, and Agenda for Future Research
• Chapter 3 Integrating Corporate Entrepreneurship and Organization Development Through Learning and Leadership
• Chapter 4 Corporate Entrepreneurial Leadership: Addressing Critical Challenges in a Disruptive Age
• Chapter 5 Corporate Entrepreneurship as a Survival Routine
• Chapter 6 Critical Elements of Team Formation to Enhance Organizational Innovation
• Chapter 7 Effectively Leveraging Design for Corporate Innovation
• Chapter 8 A Practitioner Review of Technological Firms’ Success in Corporate Innovation
• Index