Corporate Entrepreneurship &
Innovation (ECB3CEI)
Week 1: Corporate entrepreneurship and Innovation – the why and what? 2
Lecture 1 2
Week 2: CE key concepts and domains: Entrepreneurial Orientation and Strategic
Entrepreneurship 18
Lecture 2 18
Week 3: Structuring your organization for CE/innovation: organizational structure,
ambidexterity and corporate venturing 23
Lecture 3 23
Week 4: Creating a CE culture and community 35
Lecture 4 35
Week 5: Creating the ability to innovate 45
Lecture 5 45
Week 6: Creating the ability to innovate 52
Lecture 6 52
The most important lessons from this course 53
A model of CE 53
Intensity 53
Entrepreneurial context 53
Ambidexterity 53
Horizons of growth 53
Vertical structure management 53
Rules of engagement 53
Incubators 53
,Week 1: Corporate entrepreneurship and
Innovation – the why and what?
Lecture 1
The WHY? (Why is entrepreneurship interesting to look at?)
Companies and industries have been disrupted by new entrants and startups faster than
ever:
- Disruption theory (Christensen): innovation that creates a new market and value
network or enters at the bottom of an existing market and eventually displaces
established market-leading firms, products, and alliances
- Creative destruction (Schumpeter): the process of industrial mutation that
continuously revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly
destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one
The dynamic that is driving the rise and fall of industries in the 21st century is
entrepreneurship and innovation.
The rise of “the entrepreneurial method’’
- Business model canvas (Osterwalder)
- The Lean start-up (Ries)
- The startup owner’s manual (Blank)
The model of dual transformation
How do companies innovate and keep being entrepreneurial?
- How they do it
- What they do: e.g: a pharmaceutical company who go from curing diseases to
preventing them
CE is necessary for change. CE and innovation has become a major strategic goal within
organizations as they pursue significant competitive advantages.
,The new leadership challenge is about promoting a new vision, fostering new possibilities,
opening up new horizons, and inspiring others to unleash their entrepreneurial mindsets to
create new venture concepts.
Linda Hill did research for CE. She and her colleagues found that 16 leading companies who
have innovated repeatedly have one thing in common: they have created a workspace
where others are willing and able to do the hard work which leads to innovation.
The WHAT? (What is CE?)
Corporate entrepreneurship are formal or informal activities aimed at creating new
businesses in established companies through product and process innovations and market
developments. These activities may take place at the corporate, division (business),
functional or project levels, with the unifying objective of improving a company’s competitive
position and financial performance.
Corporate entrepreneurship has a positive effect on:
- financial performance: new ventures lead to new markets where you can get
money from
- strategic performance (learning capabilities, acquiring new skills and technologies,
knowledge management)
Organizations that engage in intrapreneurial activities are expected to achieve higher levels
of growth and profitability than organizations that do not” Antoncic and Hisrich
Intrapreneurship and CE: two perspectives of the same phenomenon (they do overlap, but
are in fact different)
- CE focuses on studying innovation behavior at the level of the organization, (often)
lacking the perspective of the individual intrapreneur
- Intrapreneurship is about the implementation of innovations in organizations, where
the adaption is initiated and wanted by an employee in a bottom-up way” (Pinchot,
1985; Amo, 2010)
→ Corporate Innovation is about the implementation of creative (original, realistic and
valuable) ideas or opportunities in established companies
→ Corporate Entrepreneurship are formal or informal activities aimed at creating new
businesses in established companies
→ Corporate entrepreneurship can be innovation but is not necessarily always so.
→ Corporate entrepreneurship sets the context for innovation by providing the infrastructure
needed to support and sustain innovation over time (Morris, 2008)
, Management vs. CE
A model of CE
In this model they looked at different components of organizations where they made the
distinction between if companies had a lot of intrapreneurs or if the company had an
organizational context which was stimulative for CE. They looked if this had an effect on the
innovative outcome of the organization. They found that a lot of these factors have indeed an
effect on the outcomes. The traits of the intrapreneur have a positive effect on the outcome.
An interesting thing about this research is that they found a positive relationship between the
organizational context and the intrapreneurial employee, they found an interaction effect! So
only if the context is right for the intrapreneurial employees, then the ideas will come out
positive.
