Abstract:
Entrepreneurship is an act of creation. In business entrepreneurship it manifests most
often as a new venture. Entrepreneurial ventures strive to grow and become large
organizations. But upon reaching maturity, many of these large organizations struggle to
retain their entrepreneurial orientation or “entrepreneurialness”. Their very existence is
threatened due to the increasing environmental unpredictability and accelerated
technology development. To combat these challenges many large organizations started
internal research and development divisions. While these research and development
divisions created inventions, commercializing them into innovations remained a
challenge. Encouraging entrepreneurial behavior among employees (popularly called
intrapreneurship) was identified as a solution. This resulted in the creation of internal
corporate ventures. But with the surge in disruptive technologies and lowering costs of
creating innovative new ventures, organizations soon realized that engaging in only
internal venturing efforts was not sufficient to stay in the game. Large corporations
began going outside their traditional organizational boundaries to source innovations,
technologies as well as new ventures. This is called external corporate venturing.
Corporate entrepreneurship refers to the domain within the field of entrepreneurship that
studies how entrepreneurial action is enacted by firms and their employees.
