Corporate Entrepreneurship
Summary of all chapters and articles covered in the course (6013B0501Y) by Kevin Curran.
Book: Corporate Innovation & Entrepreneurship, 3rd Edition, International Edition by Kuratko, Morris & Covin (2010)
Week 1: Overview of Corporate Entrepreneurship 2
Chapter 1: The New Entrepreneurial Imperative 2
Chapter 2: The Unique Nature of Corporate Entrepreneurship 3
Evolution and revolution as organisations grow – Greiner (1998) 4
Week 2: Building an Entrepreneurial Orientation in an Organisation 5
Chapter 3: Levels of Entrepreneurship in Organisations – Entrepreneurial Intensity 5
Chapter 8: Corporate Strategy and Entrepreneurship (p. 206-215) 6
Organisational ambidexterity in action: How managers explore and exploit – O'Reilly III & Tushman (2011) 7
Week 3: The “Intrapreneur” 8
Chapter 6: Human Resources in the Entrepreneurial Organisation – The Creative Individual (p. 166-179) 8
Chapter 7: Human Resources in the Entrepreneurial Organisation – The Organisational Perspective 9
Entrepreneurship/intrapreneurship – Hisrich (1990) 10
Entrepreneurial behaviour by employees in organisations – de Jong (2016) 11
Week 5: Internal Venturing 12
Designs for Corporate Entrepreneurship in Established Firms – Burgelman (1984) 12
Managing internal corporate venturing cycles – Burgelman & Välikangas (2005) 14
Week 6: External Venturing 15
Corporate Venturing – Dushnitsky (2018) 15
Making sense of corporate venture capital – Chesbrough (2002) 16
Week 7: Corporate Entrepreneurship in Different Sectors 17
Chapter 5: Entrepreneurship in Other Contexts – Non-Profit and Government Organisations 17
Chapter 6: Human Resources in the Entrepreneurial Organisation – The Creative Individual (p. 153-161) 20
Combining Logics to Transform Organisational Agency: Blending Industry and Art at Alessi – Dalpiaz, Rindova & Ravasi (2016)
21
,Corporate Entrepreneurship 2
Week 1: Overview of Corporate Entrepreneurship
Chapter 1: The New Entrepreneurial Imperative
• External environment: everything outside the company;
the competitive, customer, technological, economic,
regulatory, social, labour, and supplier environments.
o continuous, complex, survival threatening change
• Internal environment: everything inside the company; the
structures, systems, processes, and culture that make up
the climate within which people do the work of a company.
• Environmental turbulence creates a need for new management practices
o Shortened decision windows and diminishing opportunity streams; new performance standards and
expectations; less predictable resource needs and shorter-term commitment; relying on outsourcing, leasing,
leveraging; develop more new products faster; resources and products become obsolete more quickly; lack of
long-term control over external environments
• Important lessons learned from new strategic initiatives
o 1) external change forces internal change
o 2) no simple formulas for success – it’s all about experimentation
o 3) turbulence also means opportunity
• Sustainable competitive advantage requires that companies and managers continually reinvent themselves
o Five key company capabilities: adaptability, flexibility, speed, aggressiveness, innovativeness
▪ Ultimately come down to “entrepreneurship” – the core source of sustainable advantage
• Entrepreneurship involves the creation of wealth, enterprise, innovation, change, jobs, value, and growth
o Entrepreneurship is “the process of creating value by bringing together a unique combination of resources to
exploit an opportunity” (Stevenson & Jarillo-Mossi, 1986).
o Entrepreneurship is the ability to create and build a vision from practically nothing → energy to innovate;
take calculated risks & reduce failure; ability to build team; sense opportunity; know-how related to resources
• Corporate entrepreneurship: entrepreneurial behaviour inside established mid-sized and large organisations
o The sum of a company’s innovation, renewal, and venturing efforts.
▪ Innovation: introducing something new to the marketplace
▪ Strategic renewal: organisational renewal involving major strategic and/or structural changes
▪ Corporate venturing: entrepreneurial efforts that lead to creation of new business organisations
within the corporation
• Management versus Entrepreneurship
o Manager: preoccupied with what is; setting objectives and coordinating people; transformation process
o Entrepreneur: preoccupied with what can be; envisioning the future and exploiting opportunities
o Within great organisations, a balance is achieved between disciplined management and entrepreneurship
▪ Managers must be able to optimise current operations while at the same time engaging in activities
that make current operations obsolete i.e., they become the entrepreneurial manager
• Corporate entrepreneurs face three major challenges linked to the need for interorganisational political skills:
o 1) Achieving credibility or legitimacy for the concept and the entrepreneurial team
o 2) Obtaining resources (e.g. bootstrapping)
o 3) Overcoming inertia and resistance (people are comfortable with status quo, don’t want to feel threatened)
• Successful corporate entrepreneurs do not quit and start their own ventures because of…
o The size of the resource base that they can tap into
o The potential to operate on a fairly significant scope and scale fairly quickly
o The security they enjoy when operating in an existing company
• Organisational politics is one of the main reasons corporate entrepreneurs leave the company.
• The Organisational Life Cycle: patterns in the ways companies evolve e.g. Greiner’s (1972) 5 Stages of Growth
o A process whereby companies enter a particular stage, during which they prosper until they reach a crisis point
▪ How they deal with the crisis determines whether they move on to the next stage, or alternatively,
whether they begin a process of decline, failure, or become a candidate for acquisition.
o Stage 1: Creativity → crisis of leadership
▪ Stage 2: Direction → crisis of autonomy
• Stage 3: Autonomy → crisis of control
o Stage 4: Coordination → crisis of red tape
▪ Stage 5: Collaboration → crisis of ???
o (see page 4 for detailed explanations)
• Corporate entrepreneurship: a framework for facilitating ongoing change and innovation in established organisations; it
redefines the purpose of the enterprise, where the philosophy becomes one of “healthy dissatisfaction”
, Corporate Entrepreneurship 3
Chapter 2: The Unique Nature of Corporate Entrepreneurship
• Myths about Entrepreneurship
o 1) “entrepreneurs are born, not made” → each of us has significant entrepreneurial potential
o 2) “entrepreneurs must be inventors” → value creation does not need to entail inventing a new product
o 3) “there is a standard profile or prototype of the entrepreneur” → there are many different types of profiles
o 4) “all you need is luck to be an entrepreneur” → prepared entrepreneurs seize opportunities
o 5) “entrepreneurs are extreme risk takers” → entrepreneurs usually work on a moderated or “calculated” risk
o 6) “entrepreneurial people are academic and social misfits” → adept socially, economically, and academically
o 7) “all entrepreneurs need is money” → many other resources are vital for entrepreneurial success
o 8) “ignorance is bliss for entrepreneurs” → careful planning is the mark of an accomplished entrepreneur
o 9) “most entrepreneurial initiatives fail” → with every venture launched, new, unintended opportunities arise
o 10) “entrepreneurship is unstructured and chaotic” → typically well-organised individuals who have a system
• The Entrepreneurial Process
▪ The six stages in the process describe how a new company might be started, but they just as readily
apply to the application of entrepreneurship inside a large company.
o 1) identifying the opportunity: favourable circumstances creating a need for new business concept/approach
o 2) defining the business concept: innovative approach for capitalizing on an opportunity
o 3) assessing the resource requirements: financial and nonfinancial needs e.g. skills, patents, contacts, location
o 4) acquiring the necessary resources: resource leveraging instead of owning
o 5) implementing and managing the concept: entrepreneurs must be tolerant of ambiguity and adaptable
o 6) harvesting the venture: exit strategy for the concept
Start-Up Entrepreneurship Corporate Entrepreneurship
Entrepreneur takes the risk Opportunity recognition and definition Company assumes the risks
Entrepreneur “owns” concept or innovative Unique business concept (product, Company owns concept & typically intellectual rights
idea service, process)
Entrepreneur may have no equity in the company, or a
Entrepreneur owns all or much of the business Driven by an individual champion very small percentage
Potential rewards for the entrepreneur are Entrepreneur balances vision with Clear limits are placed on the financial rewards
theoretically unlimited managerial skill entrepreneurs can receive
One misstep can mean failure Concepts require adaptation over time Room for errors; company absorbs failure
Vulnerable to outside influence Window of opportunity More insulated from outside influence
Independence of the entrepreneur Predicated on value creation and Interdependence of the champion; have to share credit
accountability to customer
Flexibility in changing course, experimenting, Rules, procedures, and bureaucracy hinder entrepreneur’s
or trying new directions Entrepreneur encounters resistance ability to manoeuvre
and obstacles
Speed of decision making Longer approval cycles
Risk and risk management strategies
Little security Job security
Entrepreneur develops creative
No safety net Dependable benefit package
strategies for leveraging resources
Few people to talk to Extensive network for brainstorming
Involve significant ambiguity
Limited scale and scope initially Potential for sizeable scale & scope quickly
Require harvesting strategies
Severe resource limitations Access to firm resources
• Where to find entrepreneurship within a company
o 1) Traditional R&D, 2) Ad hoc venture teams, 3) New venture divisions or groups 4) Champions and the
mainstream, 5) Acquisitions, 6) Outsourcing, 7) Hybrid forms
• A Domain Framework – corporate entrepreneurship encompasses internal innovation and strategic renewal
o The extent to which corporate entrepreneurship occurs and the ways in which it is manifested are driven by
factors related to the environment, strategic leaders, organisation conduct/form, organisation performance
• A Sustaining Framework – individual behaviour and organisational strategy are both are instrumental in making the
strategic change successful
o A transformational trigger initiates the need for strategic change; achieved through entrepreneurial activity
driven by the organisational antecedents and individual entrepreneurial behaviour
• A Strategic Integration Framework – entrepreneurship is an overall orientation that drives a company
o Entrepreneurship should capture the essence of what an organisation is about and how it operates
o Corporate entrepreneurship strategy is manifested through the presence of three elements: an
entrepreneurial strategic vision, a pro-entrepreneurship organisational architecture, and entrepreneurial
processes and behaviour as exhibited across the organisational hierarchy.
