Corporate Entrepreneurship: the Antecedents at Individual and Organizational Level in Technology-based Firms

The concept of entrepreneurship is traditionally associated with the initiative of individuals who transform promising business ideas into successful new ventures. In the Schumpeterian view, the most innovative individuals are able to drive sustainable change and creative destruction in specific markets and industries, acting alone or within large companies (Schumpeter, 1934, 1949). However, the entrepreneurial process is also engaged in by established organizations, which are able to address the asymmetries between market demand and the potential of socio-technical innovation. At such an extended scale (from individuals to corporations), corporate entrepreneurship is activated as a means of achieving organizational innovation and increasing financial and market performance, with exemplary cases such as Apple, 3M, Procter & Gamble and Google. More specifically, corporate entrepreneurship represents the process of new business creation within established firms to improve organizational profitability and competitive position, or the strategic renewal of existing business (Zahra, 1991). It thus includes the creation and development of new business ventures, new products or services, or new strategies and competitive stances. Therefore, it becomes a key driver of organizational innovation, business performance and market leadership for organizations operating in technology-intensive industries. The focus on technology-based firms is timely and particularly relevant for corporate entrepreneurship. Indeed, the presence of innovative technologies and their market-relevant applications is a trigger for the creation of new products and services, as well as of the new business ventures that produce and commercialize them. The multidimensional nature of corporate entrepreneurship and its complexity in terms of enabling factors has generated the motivation for research to investigate and systematize such elements within an integrative perspective and model. In just such an endeavour, this chapter aims to identify the antecedents of corporate entrepreneurship at both the individual and organizational levels. In particular, the focus is on technology-based firms. For this purpose, this chapter is structured as follows: the next section reports some evolutionary patterns in the corporate entrepreneurship concept and its enablers. The concept of creativity is then analysed together with its relationship with organizational innovativeness, the role of human resource management as a driver of creativity and organizational innovativeness. The model and related assessment tool to be used in the corporate context are then introduced. Concluding remarks summarize the contributions of this work to theory and practice and reflect on planned and likely developments for further research.