The early stage of corporate venturing - activities and effectuation in a corporate context

Abstract

Changing Customer needs, globalisation and new technical possibilities demand for internal change within corporations to remain competitive. Corporations need to innovate or die. Increased competition forces corporations to focus on efficiency in exploiting opportunities, leading to a focus on incremental innovation. On the other hand, entrepreneurs are disrupting industries through radical innovations in a fast pace. Corporate entrepreneurship (CE), aims on combining the agility and innovative- ness of start-ups with the resources and knowledge of corporations. However, the way corporate entrepreneurs work as well as the activities they conduct, especially in the early stage has been neglected in CE research.

This study has the aim to bridge the knowledge from entrepreneurship towards the context of CE. The entrepreneurship field has progressed significantly, offering a com- prehensive state of knowledge on the activities conducted and the way entrepreneurs work. A single case study with five sub-cases in a major European engineering com- pany has been conducted to address the research gap from the corporate entrepre- neur's view. There are three main contributions to the field of CE:

The first contribution is that corporate entrepreneurs and entrepreneurs conduct activities with the same aims in the categories funding, opportunity, planning, legit- imacy building, business development and advice. While the categories remain the same, activities within the categories differ partly due to the context.

The second contribution is that corporate entrepreneurs work mainly following effec- tuation, focusing on their means and conducting activities in an iterative way. The need for structure of a corporation induces elements of a predictive logic. The means available to the corporate entrepreneur determine whether product championing takes place.

The third contribution is that a corporate support structure should complement the means of an corporate entrepreneur, either through methodical support or support in interdisciplinary team-building. For supporting radical innovations, it is recom- mended to offer facilitated customer- and user-involvement. The indirect-internal form of corporate venturing was found to be more suitable in the case company.