The Challenges of Corporate Entrepreneurship in the Disruptive Age: Volume 28

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.

In this chapter, the authors examine the main effect of entrepreneurial orientation (EO) – a firm’s strategic entrepreneurial posture – on balancing exploration and exploitation in the form of organizational ambidexterity. Resource-constrained firms face an imperative to conduct innovative activities, survive hostile environments, and compete with larger and more resource-rich firms. The authors contend that firms can address these potential impediments through achieving ambidexterity via dynamic capabilities, firm-specific resources, and institutional factors. Specifically, The authors review the EO and ambidexterity literatures and summarize extant arguments related to the relationship between EO, exploration, and exploitation. The authors also discuss the most prominent scales and measures of EO, exploration, and exploitation. Moreover, the authors discuss operationalizational challenges that should be considered when conducting EO–ambidexterity research and suggest future research directions by specifying an agenda outlining useful theoretical perspectives and various contingencies that may influence the EO–ambidexterity relationship.

To innovatively address challenges faced by corporate entrepreneurship (CE) in this modern age of globalization and digitalization, this chapter takes a fresh look at questions of learning and leadership from the perspective of organization development (OD), a field that has long studied questions of planned and emergent change. This alternate perspective adds to our knowledge and understanding of the role of individuals and teams in CE and presents opportunities to integrate learning and leadership. In particular, the OD literature provides us with multilevel measurement methods and tools to better analyze the employee and team level-of-analysis. As a result, these insights should enable us to better explain the interaction between CE strategic orientation and the performance of corporate venturing employees and teams, as well as the progress of organizational strategic renewal and market (re)creation efforts.

A corporate entrepreneurship (CE) strategy implies that a firm’s strategic intent is to continuously leverage entrepreneurial opportunities for growth- and advantage-seeking purposes. CE has gained greater research attention with a focus on the factors that influence an organization’s willingness to initiate and sustain a CE strategy. In the current disruptive age, firms acknowledge the importance of CE (also referred to as corporate innovation) as the critical element for sustained competitive advantage in the global economy. Yet, so many organizations struggle with the actual implementation of an innovative strategy. There are key challenges that must be addressed by today’s corporate entrepreneurial leaders in this age of disruptive innovation. These include framing the innovation, developing the internal architecture, coordinating the managerial levels, integrating design thinking, recognizing the grief associated with project failure, and demanding ethical standards. As research on corporate innovative activity has evolved, numerous researchers have acknowledged the importance of these leadership activities to enhance the effectiveness of corporate entrepreneurial activity. In this chapter, the authors discuss these critical elements confronting corporate entrepreneurial leaders.

In this chapter, the authors conceptualize corporate entrepreneurship as a mental model that allows firms to adapt to new competitive landscapes by facilitating the development of new cognitive scripts and schemas. The authors begin by explaining what it means for a firm to be competitively bewildered, or lost, in a rapidly changing competitive domain. The authors also describe five stages of being lost competitively. The authors then map the attributes of an entrepreneurial firm – adaptability, speed, flexibility, aggressiveness, and innovativeness – to stages of the bewilderment process wherein they may be most helpful to realign competitive realities and entrepreneurial scripts and schemas. The authors conclude by proposing contributions resulting from conceptualizing corporate entrepreneurship as a bewilderment schema and also explain how this represents a novel perspective.

Teams are an important component to the success of corporate innovation and entrepreneurship. However, innovation teams often suffer because management fails to develop a change strategy and prepare managers and participants to work in teams. This chapter provides a discussion of the critical elements needed to prepare team member, including reviewing the team development process and offering insights on how to manage communication, conflict resolution, creative problem solving, and decision-making to enhance team performance. Additionally, research on the use of innovation teams is presented along with some recommendations for management to implement innovation teams in organizations.

This chapter focuses on practical considerations for organizations when endeavoring to invest in design, specifically how designers and their organizations should view their profession for the benefit of corporate innovation. Given the lack of consensus regarding what strategic design entails, the author interviewed strategic designers from across the United States to solicit their opinions on design thinking, strategic design, and design strategy, the relationship between those concepts, and how those concepts are, could be, and should be reflected in practice.

The overarching purpose of this chapter is to explore the relatively nascent profession of strategic design, from which the author distinguishes design strategy, as well as to provide guidance regarding how design and designers should be viewed and supported by the leadership of their organizations in order to fully empower them to support innovation. In addition, this chapter serves to better define the concepts of design thinking, strategic design, and design strategy. While design as a discipline is broad, for the sake of consistency, the author discusses design in the context of technological development and, in turn, in terms of human-computer interaction.

A corporate innovation strategy implies that a firm’s strategic intent is to continuously leverage entrepreneurial opportunities for growth- and advantage-seeking purposes. Corporate innovation has gained greater research attention with a focus on the factors that influence an organization’s willingness to initiate and sustain an innovation strategy. In the current disruptive age, firms acknowledge the importance of corporate innovation (also referred to as corporate entrepreneurship) as the critical element for sustained competitive advantage in the global economy. Yet, it has been reported that many organizations struggle with the actual implementation of an innovative strategy. While there are key challenges that must be addressed by today’s corporate innovative leaders in this age of disruptive innovation, many of today’s technological companies are finding success in reaching for the future. As research on corporate innovative activity has evolved, there is still a need to examine some of the latest innovative developments with the technological sector since they are regarded as leading this disruptive age. This chapter examines the most recognized companies in the technological space and discusses their newest explorations. In addition, a framework is presented to illustrate similarities and differences in their approaches to corporate innovation activity.