My latest article was featured in the August release of Small Business Economics, which was a special issue focusing on corporate entrepreneurship. The work examines how entrepreneurship and innovation unfold in the organizational context and what firms can do to support and capitalize upon these efforts. Emerging initially out of a consulting engagement, the study provides meaningful insights for organizational strategy and the management of entrepreneurship and innovation.
At a glance -- For firms, an entrepreneurial strategy offers a framework for organizations to cope with increasing complexity and high-velocity change in the external environment through continual exploration, innovation, and adaption internally. Nevertheless, the mere development of innovation within an organization does not guarantee innovation performance at the firm level. Deliberate mechanisms must exist to consistently identify, capture, and coordinate innovation. That is, because organizations exist as a system of interrelated units, or roles, corporate entrepreneurial activities and insights tend to occur in isolated environments -- within singular departments, business units, divisions, joint ventures, strategic partners, franchises, etc. This decentralization of knowledge, then, means that a firm’s most attractive entrepreneurial opportunities often lie at the individual unit, placing much of the burden of corporate entrepreneurship on the firm’s ability to identify, harvest, and disseminate new knowledge throughout the organization and its affiliates in order to enhance the production and competitiveness of the firm at large.
As such, the sharing, or transfer, of knowledge throughout an organizational network is critical for an organization’s ability to learn and adapt and thus, effectively innovate at the firm level. Therefore -- as each individual unit within a firm is affected by the enactment of the other units that surround it and interact with it -- organizations must employ formal systems to control, disseminate, propagate, and exploit firm knowledge generated through innovation and exploration. Resulting in the development of what has been described as a learning organization, firms that effectively exhibit such entrepreneurial behavior are capable of bringing about their own continuing transformation -- improving themselves through their capacity to leverage their own knowledge and experiences to learn, innovate, and execute.
In summary, throughout the article we sought to explain how the corporate entrepreneurial process unfolds through knowledge sharing and organizational learning processes within organizations. The study was the result of a fair amount of theoretical development, practical experience, and a large amount of empirical data that was later derived from the aforementioned consulting partner. It was an interesting project to work on as much of the conversation surrounding corporate entrepreneurship to date has been centered around what is necessary to develop innovation for firms (a Google search alone will yield more hits than what would ever possibly be worth reading). However, little work has been done to explain not just what factors are necessary for innovation to occur in organizations, but also how innovations emerge within, and pervade throughout, organizations. This change in focus provides a more prescriptive strategy focused on execution and innovation performance. Simply put, corporate entrepreneurial behavior requires some associated exploitative action, otherwise corporate innovation is just a creative exercise. Our results capture knowledge sharing and organizational learning as necessary means for both driving and realizing innovation performance at the firm level and offer an additional lens to view corporate entrepreneurial behavior.
Link to original article, published in the August issue of Small Business Economics, Special Issue: Corporate Entrepreneurship in the New Global Economic Reality
