This Research Skills Summary includes all the lecture material from the course (including elaborate lecture notes, guest lecture and new papers) to pass the exam!
Summary Corporate Entrepreneurship
Table of Contents
Lecture 1 – Introduction to Course: Innovator’s Dilemma ...................................................3
Lecture Notes .......................................................................................................................... 3
Readings .................................................................................................................................. 6
Christensen, “The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail”, ..................6
(introduction only), Boston: Harvard Business School Press. ........................................................................6
Moore, “Darwin and the Demon,” Harvard Business Review, July-August 2004, p. 86-93. ..........................8
Lecture 2 – Ambidexterity ...............................................................................................12
Lecture Notes ........................................................................................................................ 12
Readings ................................................................................................................................ 17
Christensen and Overdorf, “Meeting the Challenge of Disruptive Change,” Harvard Business Review,
March-April 2000, p. 66-77. .........................................................................................................................17
Birkinshaw and Gibson, “Building Ambidexterity into an Organization,” MIT Sloan Management Review,
2004, 45(4), p. 47-55. ...................................................................................................................................21
He and Wong, “Exploration and Exploitation: An Empirical Test of the Ambidexterity Hypothesis”,
Organization Science, 2004, 15(4), p. 481–494. ...........................................................................................24
Lecture 3 – Managing Corporate Entrepreneurs ..............................................................27
Lecture Notes ........................................................................................................................ 27
Readings ................................................................................................................................ 35
Ling, Simsek, Lubatkin, and Veiga, “Transformational Leadership’s Role in Promoting Corporate
Entrepreneurship: Examining the CEO-TMT Interface,” Academy of Management Journal, 2008, Vol. 51
p.557-576. .....................................................................................................................................................35
Manso, “Creating Incentives for Innovation”, California Management Review, 2017, Vol. 60(1) 18- 32. ..39
Podolny and Hansen, “How Apple is Organized for Innovation”, Harvard Business Review, Nov/Dec 2020,
pp. 1-11. ........................................................................................................................................................44
Case: Agilent Technologies: Organizational Change (A)...............................................................................49
Lecture 4 – Decision Making Under Uncertainty ..............................................................59
Lecture Notes ........................................................................................................................ 59
Readings ................................................................................................................................ 68
McGrath, “Falling Forward: Real Options Reasoning and Entrepreneurial Failure,” Academy of
Management Review 1999 24:1, 13-30. ......................................................................................................68
McGrath and MacMillan, “Discovery Driven Planning,” Harvard Business Review, July-August 1995. ......71
Blank, “Why the lean start-up changes everything,” Harvard Business Review, May, 2013, 91(5): 63-72. 74
Lecture 5 – Internal and External Sourcing of Ideas ..........................................................76
Lecture Notes ........................................................................................................................ 76
Readings ................................................................................................................................ 87
Sethi and Iqbal, “Stage-Gate Controls, Learning Failure, and Adverse Effect on Novel New Products”,
Journal of Marketing, 2008. pp. 118-134. ....................................................................................................87
Christensen, Kaufman, and Shih “Innovation Killers: How Financial Tools Destroy Your Capacity to Do
New Things” Harvard Business Review, 2008, January, pp. 98-105. ...........................................................93
Danneels “The Dynamics of Product Innovation and Firm Competences”, Strategic Management Journal,
2002, pp. 1095-1121.....................................................................................................................................97
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,Lecture 6 – Sourcing External Knowledge ...................................................................... 103
Lecture Notes ...................................................................................................................... 103
Readings .............................................................................................................................. 105
Audretsch and Belitski. “The Limits to Open Innovation and its Impact on Innovation Performance”,
Technovation, 2023, 102519. .....................................................................................................................105
Chesbrough, “Making Sense of Corporate Venture Capital,” Harvard Business Review, 2002, March. ...108
Danneels and Miller “Corporate venture capital contributions to strategic renewal: Neglected paths and
barriers”, Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal, 2023, 17(3), 560-584. .......................................................112
,Lecture 1 – Introduction to Course: Innovator’s Dilemma
Why do large successful companies sometimes fail when confronted with disruptive changes in their
environment? This week, we will discuss a number of possible reasons, including the idea that
missing the boat can happen because of good instead of poor management.
Lecture Notes
Corporate entrepreneurship: the study of entrepreneurial behavior within established organizations
Large firms missing the boat
The fall of Nokia example shows:
- It’s hard to remain innovative
- Making wrong choices in terms of partners, etc. (strategic decisions) is likely in times of
change
- Easy to say it now, but you don’t know it then at that moment
Nokia is not the only firm (Kodak, Blackberry, Yahoo, Free Record Shop, etc.)
- They knew that change was coming and this change conflicted with their current way of
doing business (e.g. Kodak to make digital cameras)
o Not the reasons: “we cannot do it, because of time/technology/etc.”, but other
reasons often cause the fall. That’s what this course is about
Typologies of technological change:
- Old vs. new
- Competence-enhancing vs. competence-destroying
- Incremental vs. radical
- Sustaining vs. disruptive
o Disruptive innovation is more harmful for firms to remain innovative, because it is
difficult to invest in. They cannot deal with it
→ It is especially the latter types of change that large established firms have difficulties coping with.
Why? Success Syndrome
- Fit: offering something that the customer wants
- As the company becomes more successful, the company grows. The size and age are going
to increase → This leads to 2 types of inertia:
o Structural inertia (size)
o Cultural inertia (age)
- This typically slows down the company
- Although it’s something good: you’re at the peak (success). But you have to change the
business model
o People are resistant to change (stakeholders need to change along too)
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, Is inertia always bad?
- Inertia may result from accountability and reliability
- How to protect the traditional successful business and to engage in radical innovation at the
same time?
- Important to look at both past/current and future situation
Video Steve Ballmer on the expected success of Apple: inertia can be detrimental
- Few years later he did another interview
o “We were software guys” not phone guys
o Customers asked software from us, not hardware
The Innovator’s Dilemma
According to Clayton Christensen, failure to adapt to disruptive innovation is not the result of bad
management, but a result of good management
- Large companies depend on their existing customers and investors for resources
- They listen closely to these customers and investors and kill ideas for which there is little
need
- Product performance: what can a particular product do?
- New technology in the beginning is not working as well as an existing technology
- A company will be placed on one of the arrows as long as they keep working with the same
technology (upper arrow: old technology, lower arrow: disruptive technology)
o Firms can go to the other line, but many times, firms will not make this jump
because of the reasons why it’s hard to innovate (inertia)
- The letters (A-E) represent points where a company can be
o A: not making everyone happy, but for regular products, it’s good enough
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