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Internal corporate venturing: riding the relational rollercoaster through sensemaking and sensegiving reconfiguration
Abstract
Purpose
Internal corporate venturing is a vehicle for firms to realize strategic and financial goals through entrepreneurial ventures. Prior research presents a strategic process in which individual managers make rational choices based on their formal roles and top-down corporate objectives. Recent work has challenged this by adopting a relational approach using a macro-level perspective highlighting cultural and institutional logics. This study augments and develops this relational approach by contributing a micro-level perspective by focusing on managers engaged in developing ventures in large organizations. The data show how internal corporate venturing (ICV) actors use discursive practices to make sense of their relationship contexts and develop interpretive repertoires to give sense to their decisions and shape their future strategies. The data illustrate how corporate venturing actors make sense of their uncertain experience and develop insider-outsider strategies by balancing three competing interpretive repertories, which form the basis of strategies supporting an entrepreneurial future in an organizational context.
Design/methodology/approach
Forty-two interviews were conducted with ICV actors, including senior directors of corporate venturing units in multinational corporations and their venture project leaders. The authors conducted a micro-level study through an interpretive sensemaking analysis of managers' “talk.” Interviews are considered through three lenses: “functional talk” (why they said it), “interpretive themes” (what they said) and “interpretive repertoires” (how they said it).
Findings
The perceived challenges experienced by the participants through their relationships were identified. Participants emphasized balancing project and organizational role risk in pursuing venture development, leading to a perceived dependent trust relationship between supporters. Three interpretive repertories were identified through which participants positioned their explanations of their relationship contexts in ICV. Participants used these to discursively frame their corporate venturing practices and position their future strategies.
Originality/value
A new framework of corporate venture sensemaking and sensegiving reconfiguration is provided to explain how managers discursively resolve conflicting relationship pressures while maintaining personal positioning. The paper shows how conflicting interpretive repertoires and personal interpretations are generated through a discursive practice comprising sensemaking and sensegiving reconfiguration processes to shape their future strategies. The paper contributes to theory by explicating the relational perspective of ICV at the micro-level and demonstrates how this is influenced by the discursive practices of managers leading the ICV activity.
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Despite the rapid growth of research on organizational sensemaking and an acknowledgment of the critical role of language in the sensemaking process, the literature on sensemaking and language is fragmented. In particular, there is no systematic review that explains the roles and functions of different linguistic elements in meaning construction. The purpose of this review paper is to develop an integrative theoretical framework that organizes existing research in a way that allows us to better understand how different linguistic processes shape the construction of meaning in sensemaking. First, we explain how a cognitive linguistic perspective elucidates how language provides the cognitive associations, schema, and frames used in sensemaking. Second, we discuss how a focus on the social practices of language use, as in rhetorical, narrative, or interactionist approaches, illuminates the patterns of meaning-making among organizational members in social interaction. Third, we explain how a focus on discourse helps us to understand how discursive structures enable or constrain sensemaking and thereby reproduce or transform systems of thought. This leads us to turn to the differences in these perspectives and suggest how they can be brought together in an integrative theoretical framework. Finally, we discuss the contributions of our framework and propose an agenda for future research focusing on the multifaceted role of language in sensemaking, intertextual and multimodal links in the language of sensemaking, the agentic and structural role of language in sensemaking, episodic and latent aspects of language use in sensemaking, and the role of power in discursive sensemaking.
In recent decades, there has been growing interest in intrapreneurial capabilities. The intrapreneurship and strategic management literatures have insights for entrepreneurs about how to apply entrepreneurial and strategic techniques and concepts in creating competitive advantage. More specifically, the dynamic capabilities framework has emerged as a useful tool for managers to better develop and manage intrapreneurial capabilities. Our essay and the papers in this special issue provide a timely opportunity to assess the rise of intrapreneurship and address organizational and policy implications.
Despite its centrality to a longstanding literature on corporate entrepreneurship, no systematic review of the internal corporate venturing (ICV) literature has (to our knowledge) been published to date. Given the longevity, complexity and dispersed nature of both the ICV phenomenon and its literature, a review appears timely. Using criterion sampling, supplemented by the ancestry method, to identify relevant articles, we content-analyzed 131 articles published between 1963 and 2013.
While practice-oriented literature, venture-level analyses, and the use of cross-sectional case methods and surveys have dominated, an increasingly diverse and sophisticated set of theoretical perspectives have been brought to bear on a wide range of themes. The extant set of major themes examined in the ICV literature – i.e. managerial guidelines for conducting ICV; forms of ICV; comparisons of ICV and other venturing modes; the role of ICV in parent company strategy; the impact of venture strategy on ICV outcomes; the impact of organizational context on ICV outcomes; debates concerning the structural separation versus integration of ICV; processes of ICV; and temporal dynamics underlying ICV – show room for building enhanced conceptual and empirical rigor, as well as for continued exploration. In addition, considerable scope exists for exploring new research avenues concerning this challenging and strategically important phenomenon.
This paper proposes a model of entrepreneurial action that integrates three distinct elements. First, it brings together action and time to articulate a recursive relationship between perception and action, mediated by consequences. Second, it brings together action and context to ground the entrepreneur’s perceptions and actions in a mesh of social orders and practices. Third, it articulates the content of perceptions and actions as discursive entries and exits in a social language game of giving and asking for reasons. We discuss a number of implications for a systematic understanding of different manifestations of entrepreneurship.
Theory and research typically suggest that internal corporate (ICV) venture managers should be granted the freedom needed to manage their new business initiatives as they choose, with little or no interference from senior levels of corporate management. The current research investigates the relationship between venture planning autonomy and venture performance, arguing that this relationship is affected by the types (i.e., goal related or value proposition related) and levels (low-to-high) of strategic evolution occurring in the ICV. Data collected from 145 ICVs operating in 72 corporations indicate that venture planning autonomy is most positively related to venture performance when those ICVs’ goals remain stable over the course of venture operations, but the value propositions of those ICVs are evolving.
This article examines the effects of power on sensemaking processes, bridging two major, yet traditionally separate, literatures in organization studies. Dividing power into its systemic and episodic forms, we elaborate how power shapes not only the content of sensemaking, but also the form of sensemaking processes. We explicate the distinct ways in which power works in four archetypal sensemaking processes: automatic (preconscious and committed), improvisational (preconscious and provisional), algorithmic (conscious and committed) and reflective (conscious and provisional). These ideal-type processes help us theorize how influences related to systemic and episodic power induce more or less conscious and provisional forms of sensemaking. This refined understanding of sensemaking processes enables further explication of episodic power into distinctive kinds of sensegiving and sensebreaking activities.
This study explores the domain of corporate venturing using a theoretically grounded classification typology as an organizing scheme. The typology is applied in a field study of corporations that are active In venturing and based in the United Kingdom or the United States. Corporate venturing is classified into four generic forms by the focus of entrepreneurship and the presence of investment intermediation: (1) direct-internal venturing; (2) direct-external venturing; (3) indirect-internal venturing; and (4) indirect-external venturing. A managerial decision framework is offered to assist corporate executives in selecting potentially appropriate forms of corporate venturing, given specific venturing objectives and corporate circumstances.
In this paper, we use an integrated resource dependence and institutional perspective to examine how parent companies and their corporate venturing (CV) programs negotiate and construct their venturing logic. Building on prior CV configuration research, we develop a theoretically grounded typology consisting of eight CV logics. Our typology holistically integrates aspects of institutional duality and competing logics with the influence of mutual resource dependencies and power imbalances arising from the three-way interplay between the parent company, the CV program, and the external environment.
Corporate venture (CV) units constitute vehicles through which firms may act ambidextrously, thereby increasing their longevity, but they suffer from a high failure rate. The authors examine why and how some CV units last significantly longer than others. They argue that CV units endure by developing an ambidextrous orientation themselves—they build new capabilities for the parent firm while simultaneously leveraging its existing strengths. They argue that CV units become ambidextrous by nurturing a supportive relational context, defined by the strength of their relationships with three different sets of actors—parent firm executives, business unit managers, and members of the venture capital community. Using primary data collected from 95 CV units over a three-year period, the authors test and find support for these arguments.
How do corporate venture capitalists (CVCs) do deals? Conversations with CVCs suggest that the putative view of venture capital investing is incomplete. We draw on 13 cases of CVC programs to document eight 'corporate investment practices' that are unique to CVCs. These practices reflect pressure on the CVC units for strategic fit and engagement with the corporation and also an opportunity to utilize parental resources. We then show that CVCs vary their emphasis on corporate investment practices, diverging into two distinct investment logics, 'integrated'versus 'arm's-length.'Focus of isomorphism on internal versus external stakehold-ers explains the emergence of the two logics.
Internal corporate ventures (ICVs) are entrepreneurial initiatives originated within a company and intended from inception as new businesses for the parent. The literature suggests that parent–ICV structural separation positively affects ICV performance. However, the literature also suggests that ICVs can be nurtured within the parent's existing organizational structure. Our model explores ICV operations independence as a knowledge flow impediment affecting ICV performance. Primary data from 145 ICVs suggest that operations independence is not associated with ICV performance, but that parent–venture market familiarity, venture opportunity identification mode, and venture planning autonomy moderate the relationship between operations independence and ICV performance.
Through an inductive study of six corporate venture capital programs, we unravel how new organizational units resolve competing forces from two different institutional environments. The data suggest that the organizational structure of units that enter a new environment depends on whether they "focus their isomorphism" internally toward the parent ("endoisomorphism") or externally toward the industry ("exoiso-morphism"). The focus of isomorphism depends on whom the units seek legitimacy with and on the professionalization of their top management teams. We discuss implications of the findings for institutional theory, corporate venture capital, and corporate venturing more generally. From the very beginning, we wanted to inculcate the sense that although we operate under this brand [the corporate brand], we are very much in effect a pri-vate equity fund. We didn't want to feel constrained by the brand, and let it affect our judgment; so we were very insistent from the beginning that the way we are organized should be almost in antithesis to how [the parent corporation] is organized. (invest-ment partner in a corporate venture capital program) We were careful to adopt as much of [the parent's] culture as possible. For instance, we practice the same role culture and communication structure. . . . Even our offices have the same layout. (head of a different corporate venture capital program)
Sensemaking is the process through which people work to understand issues or events that are novel, ambiguous, confusing, or in some other way violate expectations. As an activity central to organizing, sensemaking has been the subject of considerable research which has intensified over the last decade. We begin this review with a historical overview of the field, and develop a definition of sensemaking rooted in recurrent themes from the literature. We then review and integrate existing theory and research, focusing on two key bodies of work. The first explores how sensemaking is accomplished, unpacking the sensemaking process by examining how events become triggers for sensemaking, how intersubjective meaning is created, and the role of action in sensemaking. The second body considers how sensemaking enables the accomplishment of other key organizational processes, such organizational change, learning, and creativity and innovation. The final part of the chapter draws on areas of difference and debate highlighted throughout the review to discuss the implications of key tensions in the sensemaking literature, and identifies important theoretical and methodological opportunities for the field.
We report on the findings of an inductive, interpretive case study of organizational identity change in the spin-off of a Fortune 100 company's top-performing organizational unit into an independent organization. We examined the processes by which the labels and meanings associated with the organization's identity underwent changes during and after the spin-off, as well as how the organization responded to these changes. The emergent model of identity change revolved around a collective state of identity ambiguity, the details of which provide insight into processes whereby organizational identity change can occur. Additionally, our findings revealed previously unreported aspects of organizational change, including organization members' collective experience of “change overload” and the presence of temporal identity discrepancies in the emergence of the identity ambiguity.
In this paper we draw on and develop an actor-network perspective on organizational entrepreneurship—the study of enterprising behaviour within the firm. Based on the findings of an in-depth study of management consultants in a UK telecommunications firm, we argue that ideas do not flourish because they are inherently more `enterprising' or `innovative' than others, but rather because of the success (or otherwise) of the process of `enrolment'. Our study shows that the consultants were not `intermediaries without discretion', tasked with the diffusion of an already-established template. Rather, they acted as mediators by actively seeking to construct and maintain a network around their idea. By revealing the political tactics and power plays involved in this enrolment process, our study contributes to the actor-network literature by highlighting the link to organizational power and politics. The study also contributes by drawing attention to the subjectivity of network-builders—an issue often left under-explored in actor-network studies. We illuminate the identity processes involved in organizational entrepreneurship, including the link to systems of organizational control. This was fuelled by a mixture of anxiety, insecurity and the desire to be recognized as an `intra-preneur'.
A significant barrier to creating and sustaining firms are the difficulties experienced in continually legitimating their institutional structures. This is especially the case for small firms; entrepreneurs struggle to create and sustain often novel ideas and nascent firm structures set within, or against, well-established market environments. To better understand connections between organization formation and legitimacy of small firms we use accounts from three entrepreneurs. We break down their accounts using Aristotle’s concept of rhetoric. By attending to what Aristotle identified as the three areas of concern for rhetorical method (logos, ethos and pathos) to analyse the entrepreneurs’ sensemaking, we show their awareness of the negotiated, situated and social nature of their enterprises. Our findings expand on existing concepts such as Lounsbury and Glynn’s (2001) ‘cultural entrepreneurship’, by demonstrating how collaborative sensemaking might be practised and how social competence and an awareness of others’ needs, wishes, ambitions and objectives are central to the foundation and potential success of small firms.
Organizational ambidexterity, defined as an organization's ability to be aligned and efficient in its management of today's business demands while simultaneously being adaptive to changes in the environment, has gained increasing interest in recent years. In this article, the authors review various literature streams to develop a comprehensive model that covers research into the antecedents, moderators, and outcomes of organizational ambidexterity. They indicate gaps within and across different research domains and point to important avenues for future research.
A longitudinal study of the social processes of organizational sensemaking suggests that they unfold in four distinct forms: guided, fragmented, restricted, and minimal. These forms result from the degree to which leaders and stakeholders engage in "sensegiving"—attempts to influence others' understandings of an issue. Each of the four forms of organizational sensemaking is associated with a distinct set of process characteristics that capture the dominant pattern of interaction. They also each result in particular outcomes, specifically, the nature of the accounts and actions generated.
Corporate social initiatives are well positioned to generate virtuousness through and
within organizations. Yet they are embedded in multiple and potentially contradictory
institutional demands of profit and social logics, which must be addressed to sustain the
initiative. Generatively addressing this perceived contradiction requires intentional and
purposeful work by institutional actors. In this article, we posit that middle managers
are crucial actors in performing this work and maintaining the hybridity of logics. We
build on theories of institutional work and on sensemaking–sensegiving to describe
the middle manager’s process of meeting competing demands of the initiative. We
then propose a conceptual model and illustrate the posited relationships with data
from the field. This describes how middle managers act on behalf of the organization
and create virtuous human systems through sustenance of corporate social initiatives.
We highlight various capacities required for this work and propose ways in which
organizations can enable these capacities.
For high-technology entrepreneurs, attaining an appropriate level of investment to support new ventures is challenging as substantial investment is usually required prior to revenue generation. Consequently, entrepreneurs must present their firms as investment ready in the context of an uncertain market response and an absence of any trading history. Gaining tenancy within a business incubator can be advantageous to this process given that placement enhances entrepreneurial contact with potential investors whilst professional client advisors (CAs) use their expertise to assist in the development of a credible business plan. However, for the investment proposal to be successful, it must make sense to fund managers despite their lack of technological expertise and product knowledge. Thus, this article explores how incubator CAs and entrepreneurs act in concert to mould innovative ideas into plausible business plans that make sense to venture fund investors. To illustrate this process, we draw upon empirical evidence which suggests that CAs act as sense makers between venture fund managers (VFMs) and high-technology entrepreneurs, yet their role and influence appears undervalued. These findings have implications for entrepreneurial access to much needed funding and also for the identification of investment opportunities for VFMs.
In contrast to structurally-determinist and cognitive/agency-oriented views of opportunity recognition, it is argued that opportunity formation is relationally and communally constituted — an insight that is not recognized in descriptive or linear process models of opportunity recognition. To arrive at this claim, use is made of social constructionist ideas. These ideas have been frequently applied in entrepreneurship studies but less attention has been given to the relational aspects of social constructionist thinking particularly with regard to opportunity formation processes. To aid this line of enquiry an analysis is undertaken of a sibling-autobiographical account of a high-profile business venture, Coffee Republic. This account has been crafted by the sibling partnership with a particular audience in mind (the would-be entrepreneur) with guidelines and principles on how ‘anyone can do it’. However, it is not utilized here as a good specimen of business venturing to be probed for particular (hidden) meanings. Instead, the account is evaluated in order to illustrate how individualistic statements about opportunity discovery can be reconceptualized as relationally and communally constituted – an emphasis which is important for widening our theoretical understanding of the activities that we label entrepreneurship.
This article analyses the agreed and discrepant sensemaking of members of a project team. Embedded in a narratological approach to sensemaking research, we argue that before scholars may be able to understand in detail how agreements are reached and action becomes coordinated,we need first to take seriously the proposition that sensemaking occurs in the context of individuals’ idiosyncratic efforts at identity construction. This, we suggest, means attending to the narratives that actors tell about their work and self both for others and their selves. The key research contribution that we make is to demonstrate how work on ‘impression management’ and ‘attributional egotism’may be employed in order to account for discrepant sensemaking. This is important in the context of a literature that has left relatively unexplored the reasons why people interpret differently experiences they have in common.
Purpose
This study unpacks how organizational members construct a collective entrepreneurial identity within an organization and attempt to instill entrepreneurial features in the organization's existing identity.
Design/methodology/approach
The study draws on the cases of two venturing units, perceived as entrepreneurial groups within their respective parent companies. Semi-structured interviews and secondary data were collected and analyzed inductively and abductively.
Findings
The data revealed that organizational members co-constructed a “corporate entrepreneur” role identity to form a collective shared belief and communities of practice around what it meant to act as an entrepreneurial group within their local corporate context and how it differentiated them from others. Members also clustered around the emergent collective entrepreneurial identity through sensegiving efforts to instill entrepreneurial features in the organization's identity, despite the tensions this caused.
Originality/value
Previous studies in corporate entrepreneurship have theorized on the top-down dynamics instilling entrepreneurial features in an organization's identity, but have neglected the role of bottom-up dynamics. This study reveals two bottom-up dynamics that involve organizational members' agentic role in co-constructing and clustering around a collective entrepreneurial identity. This study contributes to the middle-management literature, uncovering champions' identity work in constructing a “corporate entrepreneur” role identity, with implications for followers' engagement in constructing a collective entrepreneurial identity. This study also contributes to the organizational identity literature, showing how tensions around the entrepreneurial group's distinctiveness may hinder the process of instilling entrepreneurial features in an organization's identity.
This study provides a fine-grained analysis of the decision-making process and criteria underling the evaluation and selection of nascent corporate ventures. By integrating a small sample case-based analysis and the examination of a longitudinal dataset comprising 14 years of archival data, it explores the selection and funding process of early-stage entrepreneurial initiatives supported by the internal corporate venture unit of a major energy company. Its findings extend prior conceptualizations of the internal venture selection process, uncovering differences in the relevance of the criteria used to evaluate ventures at different stages.
Today, firms encounter scarce resources and rapid technology change which render formerly successful business models obsolete. Research shows that some firms perform better than others in continuously discovering, evaluating, and exploiting opportunities in volatile environments and that this is dependent on firm’s dynamic capabilities. Besides obtaining dynamic capabilities through internal R&D activities, firms have open up their innovation process to pursue dynamic capabilities outside their organizational boundaries through external corporate venturing by accessing startup's technological capabilities necessary to innovate. External corporate venturing is a means to develop new distinctive capabilities and businesses by exploring and exploiting business opportunities outside a firm’s existing boundaries. Drawing on the dynamic capability literature, we use a multiple case study approach to examine the contribution of external corporate venturing to firms’ dynamic capabilities. Our results reveal that firms indeed use corporate venturing to identify and exploit startup’s technological knowledge and competencies to increase firm’s dynamic capabilities. But our empirical data also shows that not every firm is fully profiting from all dynamic capability phases as their corporate venturing modes are not linked with each other and cumulative effects are not realized.
While the importance of absorptive capacities for the engagement in innovative activities has been addressed in numerous studies, the drivers remain an open question. As absorptive capacities are indispensably linked to an individual's human capital, the management of these capacities needs to consider the mobility of individuals. We focus on absorptive capacities as an operationalization and essential part of firms' intrapreneurial capabilities that enable firms to both understand and exploit existing internal and external knowledge and generate and implement new ideas to enhance competitiveness. Considering both the labor stock and mobility on a regional and firm level, our results suggest that the firm/regional labor stock and the firm/regional labor mobility on their own do not have a positive effect on firms' absorptive capacities. Rather, it is the interaction of the firm and regional labor stock and especially firm and regional labor mobility that positively influence firms' absorptive capacities, indicating that labor mobility may only have positive effects if fluid labor markets facilitate adequate matches between employees and employers. We conclude by positing an agenda for future research and discussing implications for both firm managers as well as policymakers.
Adopting Karen Barad’s material-discursive feminism, this paper investigates how human/non-human elements intra-act and blur together across time and space to produce the phenomena and paradoxes of Women’s Economic Empowerment (WEE). Based on historical analyses of WEE and work with Walmart and other corporations involved in WEE, the author reveals how corporate-based WEE interventions unfold from historically-based and on-going entanglements of actors, discursive practices, an array of tangible and intangible elements (e.g. documents, systems, feedback loops) and marketing devices (e.g. commitments, metrics, stories, human transparency, myths). This paper expands views on agency and discourse, and advances understandings of WEE/CSR by making these complex intra-activities visible. It considers the role discursive practices and actors – including the author – play in these intra-activities and the effects of resultant (in)visibilities.
Our intent in this commentary is to support the turn to materiality in organizational research, and contribute to it by considering some differences in our approach from that proposed by Hardy and Thomas. Drawing on agential realism – which theorizes the entanglement of matter and meaning – we explore the relation between discourse and materiality in terms of the ideas of materialization and performativity as enacted in a study of hotel valuation in the hospitality industry. We offer our comments in the spirit of constructive engagement and hope that our discussion along with others in this Point-Counterpoint will generate further explorations.
'In this critical tour de force, Jones and Spicer take aim at the figure of the entrepreneur that has loomed so large in programmes of political and organizational reform over the last three decades. Drawing on an impressively wide range of sources, they offer a timely and disturbing meditation on a category of personhood whose ideals of conduct we are all increasingly expected to imitate, no matter how perverse this injunction turns out to be. This is a fascinating and original text, that offers a sustained, sideways look at one of the key characters of our times.'
This article reviews the academic literature on corporate venture capital (CVC), that is, minority equity investments by established corporations in privately held entrepreneurial ventures. The article is organized as follow. It starts with a detailed definition of corporate venture capital, its historical background, and an extensive review of investment patterns. Next it discusses the corporate venture capital literature, with an emphasis on rigorous empirical studies published in leading academic journals. It reviews firms' objectives through the governance of their CVC programs and the relationships with the portfolio companies, and examines the interactions between CVC investment and other firm activities (e.g., alliances and M&A) as well as other entities (e.g., independent venture capital funds). The performance of the parent corporations, entrepreneurial ventures, and CVC programs is summarized next. The article concludes with directions for future research.
The abstract for this document is available on CSA Illumina.To view the Abstract, click the Abstract button above the document title.
Private venture capital casts a long shadow over corporate ventures, in part because they compete for the same entrepreneurial talent. Corporate venturing may improve its performance by emulating certain practices of private venture capital but will never achieve the structures that private venture capital can create. Instead, the design principles for corporate ventures should embrace potential structural advantages of corporate venturing and leverage those advantages. These potential advantages include: an indefinite time horizon, the ability to commit very large sums of capital, the ability to coordinate complementarities with non-tradable corporate assets, and the ability to retain greater group and organizational learning from failed venture experiences. Lucent's New Ventures Group adopts many useful practices of private venture capital, but retains some of the potential structural advantages of venturing within an established firm.
Through a wide-ranging critical review of relevant publications, we explore and articulate what constitutes the sensemaking perspective in organization studies, as well as its range of applications and limitations. More specifically, we argue that sensemaking in organizations has been seen as consisting of specific episodes, is triggered by ambiguous events, occurs through specific processes, generates specific outcomes, and is influenced by several situational factors. Furthermore, we clarify the application range of the sensemaking perspective and identify, as well as account for, the types and aspects of organizational sensemaking that have been under-researched. We critically discuss the criticism that the sensemaking perspective has received so far and selectively expand on it. Finally, we identify the main limitations of the sensemaking perspective, which, if tackled, will advance it: the neglect of prospective sensemaking, the exclusive focus on disruptive episodes at the expense of more mundane forms of sensemaking implicated in routine activities, the ambiguous status of enactment, the conflation of first-order and second-order sensemaking, and the lack of proper attention to embodied sensemaking. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Entrepreneurship is the process by which firms notice opportunities and act (by creatively organizing transactions between factors of production) to create surplus value. Using concepts from information and agency theory, this article examines how agency problems affect the dynamics of internal corporate entrepreneurship and the level of entrepreneurial behavior The relationship between internal corporate and external entrepreneurship is explored, and the organizationalfactors that cause agency problems are examined. Finally, solutions to agency problems are suggested that also promote internal corporate entrepreneurship.
This paper reviews studies which investigate inter-organizational encounters from sensemaking and discourse analytical perspectives and extends this line of reasoning by proposing a research method and agenda. Sensemaking methodologies address discursive processes of meaning construction and analyze the effects of shared as well as divergent ways of making sense. Critical discourse analyses focus on wider societal discourses as relevant resources that are drawn upon and reconstructed in inter-organizational sensemaking and sensegiving processes. We outline the rationales, methodologies and main findings of extant research and contribute to this body of work by integrating Karl Weick's sensemaking approach and Jurgen Link's critical interdiscourse analysis. This integrative methodology is particularly suited for investigating the role of mediating instruments such as figures, graphs and other 'interdiscursive charts' as relevant, thus far under-researched sensemaking resources in inter-organizational encounters.
This study investigates the types of championing processes that explain the innovativeness of 136 internal corporate ventures. Current theory suggests that bottom-up champions create the most innovative ventures. In contrast, this paper argues that both bottom-up and top-down champions are suitable for developing innovative ventures. Using a broadly based sample of Fortune 1000 firms, the study supports both bottom-up and top-down processes including a special dual-role principal champion, who acts both as product champion and organizational sponsor. The functions or roles of these top management and dual-role champions are quite different from bottom-up champions and represent relatively unexplored top-down championing processes. Preliminary results show support for an emerging theory that top management champions arise when ventures are expensive and visible and when they represent new strategic directions or resource reconfigurations for the firm. In contrast, dual-role champions emerge from the firm's upper ranks when an innovative idea is highly uncertain but not technology-driven. The paper proposes an integrative view of championing in which any one of three types of championing processes may be the most relevant for a particular venture, depending on what it needs to achieve innovative outcomes.
Internal ventures and a firm's core competencies are mutually constitutive, since each both contributes to and builds on the other. This field study compared successful and failed new product ventures In four large firms, to learn how competencies and ventures relate. The link between ventures and competencies was important to success. It was also difficult to achieve, because a scaffolding of reified rules, called core incompetencies, had grown around the competencies to dominate thought and action. Some ways to break out of the core incompetencies are developed from the successful efforts, and summarized in the discussion.
This article maps the various interests and orientations of social constructionism as a basis for: (1) situating work in the field, (2) understanding differences in its interests and scope, (3) making deliberate choices about our own approach to social constructionist research and (4) thinking about how these choices might play through our teaching. The article suggests that these orientations are based on various underlying assumptions about the nature of social reality, which influence how we conceptualize and study organizations and management. It offers an example of one such orientation—relationally responsive social constructionism—and explores its implications for knowledge and learning.
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to develop an understanding of the effects of existing capabilities, by exploration and exploitation, on the choice between internal corporate venturing and external corporate venturing.
Design/methodology/approach
Data from 259 Taiwanese firms in the information technology (IT) sector are collected. The study period is four years: 2003 to 2006. Information on corporate financial data and new ventures from the Taiwan Economic Journal (TEJ) database are collected, as well as patent information from the Taiwan Intellectual Property Office (TIPO). Poisson regression is used to test the hypotheses.
Findings
There exists a positive relationship between a firm's existing capabilities and corporate venturing activities. The findings indicate that exploration is a better predictor of internal corporate venturing, while exploitation is better at predicting external corporate venturing.
Research limitations/implications
Empirical results are derived from a sampling of information technology firms in Taiwan thus raising issues about their generalizability to other empirical contexts.
Practical implications
That internal and external corporate venturing could be complementary is clarified; meaning that each could contribute to a particular type of strategic renewal. For firms that engaged much more in exploration, internal corporate venturing is a better for growth than external corporate venturing; it can leverage existing technologies and keep valuable breakthrough technologies in‐house. In contrast, for firms that focus much more on exploitation, learning externally is a better renewal strategy than venturing internally; it can access and integrate resources trans‐organizationally to create novelty that may serve as avenues for further growth.
Originality/value
This is the first study that compares the effects of exploration and exploitation with regard to the decision to engage in internal or external corporate venturing.
This paper seeks to develop an exploratory model illustrating the critical elements needed for a sustained corporate entrepreneurship. Specifically, the model integrates and extends previous models that have examined the organizational or individual components of entrepreneurial activity. The proposed model provides additional theoretical foundation emphasizing the importance of perceived implementation/output relationships at both the individual and organizational level. The perceived satisfaction of these relationships provides the basis for whether or not a corporate entrepreneurial activity will be sustained.
This paper reports on the first stage of a two-year study exploring the learning experiences of the founders of four independently owned and growth-oriented businesses in the cultural media industry. The ventures include independent radio, marketing and design consultancy, Internet business development and cultural media retailing. The cultural media industry is a distinctive sector of growing economic importance, but the development of businesses within it and the acquisition of business and entrepreneurial skills by their founders are not well researched. Even the founders of successful businesses may not necessarily consider themselves to be entrepreneurs, as distinct from media practitioners, and the application of orthodox business and entrepreneurial theories developed in other sectors cannot be assumed to be valid in creative and media enterprises. This study adopts a social constructionist stance in seeking to develop new understanding of the emergence of learning as social practice, which may be shared through narrative accounts and interpreted as discourse. The four owners of media businesses are being followed through an in-depth longitudinal research study as they develop their business ventures and confront new challenges of managing growth and organizational change. Each is engaging in the research process by narrating and updating with the researcher an account of his or her learning experience in starting and managing the business. Their accounts form jointly authored, negotiated narratives that illustrate the development of entrepreneurial ways of working and the application of sense-making to produce 'practical theories' of action. The paper presents reflections on the research process after one year by selecting significant themes from the narrative accounts and relating these to theoretical and practical considerations of entrepreneurial identity and learning. To do this, it employs the literary medium of a short story in the 'ethnographic fiction science' genre, drawing on authentic speech material gathered during the research process. It explores the themes of identity in personal and social emergence, the negotiated enterprise, and the role of contextual learning in shaping practical theories of action.
This conceptual article introduces a dynamic learning perspective of entrepreneurship that builds upon existing “dominant” theoretical approaches to understanding entrepreneurial activity. As many aspects of entrepreneurial learning remain poorly understood, this article maps out and extends current boundaries of thinking regarding how entrepreneurs learn. It presents key conclusions from emergent empirical and conceptual work on the subject and synthesizes a broad range of contributory adult, management, and individual learning literature to develop a robust and integrated thematic conceptualization of entrepreneurial learning. Three distinctive, interrelated elements of entrepreneurial learning are proposed—dynamic temporal phases, interrelated processes, and overarching characteristics. The article concludes by demonstrating how a “learning lens” can be applied to create further avenues for research in entrepreneurship from a learning perspective.
Advances the notion of "intrapreneuring," an in-house form of entrepreneurship, and examines how intrapreneurs and corporations can work together for mutual benefit. Innovation is essential to continued commercial vitality and large organizations often have the ideas and resources to implement innovation. What they often lack, however, is a corporate culture that fosters identifying and converting these ideas into commercially viable ventures. The solution, according to the author, is the intrapreneur: one who takes a hands-on responsibility for creating innovation within the organization. Using a case study approach, the book analyzes characteristics of intrapreneurs, the intrapreneurial process, and how companies can develop an intrepreneurial culture. Intrapreneurs prefer action to extensive planning; nevertheless, they are calculated risk-takers who will assume responsibility for envisioning the necessary product, market, and management strategies. Because of this preference, the objectives of the intrapreneur can be aligned with the needs of the company. Furthermore, intrapreneuring provides an innovator with a built-in stock of assets, allowing the employee more time to implement the vision and less need to worry about securing investment capital that is faced by entrepreneurs. The intrapreneurial process is similar to the entrepreneurial process, with business plans and idea champions. Intrapreneuring also distinctively involves a role for the in-house sponsor, one who will finesse the corporate politics while the intrapreneur attends single-mindedly to making the idea a reality. Frequently, sponsors are found among owners, CEOs and former intrapreneurs. The last section of the book identifies corporate cultural factors that will promote intrapreneurship. Additionally, the need for appropriate incentives, since few intrapreneurs are driven by a desire to accumulate massive wealth, is discussed. The author proposes a system of "intracapital," a commitment to provide a certain amount of discretionary funds without an expiration date as a reward to in-house innovators. (CAR)
Corporate venturing (CV) is said to be most productive as a path to superior corporate performance when practiced in a strategic manner. Unfortunately, considerable ambiguity exists concerning what it means in an organizational practice sense to strategically pursue CV. The result is a failure of many companies to fully leverage CV for strategic purposes. Based on a review of the CV literature and findings from a field study of 15 Swedish, U.K., and U.S. corporations, this article describes several models that depict the ways in which CV and business strategy coexist as organizational phenomena. Empirically derived propositions are offered to suggest how some companies are strategically engaged in their CV efforts.