Corporate Entrepreneurship: A Strategic and Structural Perspective

Abstract

Corporate Entrepreneurship has been recognized as a potentially viable means for promoting and sustaining organizational performance, renewal and corporate competitiveness over the past three decades. The entrepreneurial activities help companies to develop new businesses that create revenue streams. Corporate Entrepreneurship activities also enhance a company's success by promoting product and process innovations. Corporate Entrepreneurship is embodying risk taking, pro-activeness and radical product innovations. These Corporate Entrepreneurship activities can improve organizational growth and profitability and, depending on the company's competitive environment, their impact may increase over time. The empirical evidence is compelling that Corporate Entrepreneurship improves company performance by increasing the firm's pro-activeness and willingness to take risks, and by pioneering the development of new products, process and services through enriching its competitiveness. However, the creation of corporate activity is difficult since, it involves radically changing internal organizational behaviour patterns. Many studies have attempted to understand the factors that accelerate or impede Corporate Entrepreneurship, which examined the effect of a firm's strategy, organization and external environment. It appears that the environment plays a profound role and influencing. There is consensus that the external environment is an important antecedent of Corporate Entrepreneurship. Focus on the environment, the literature highlights two fire-burning questions that deserve examination. First, how do firms that compete in different environments vary in the Corporate Entrepreneurship activities? Second, which Corporate Entrepreneurship activities are philosophicative, processicative and conductive to superior performance in different environments? In this backdrop, the present paper develops a theoretical foundation of these questions and emphasizing on the perceptual mapping between Corporate Entrepreneurship and strategic management in a integrating model of Corporate Entrepreneurship, giving special and unique attention to the strategic behaviour, corporate context and organizational types.