Abstract
Innovation remains a major challenge to most corporate leaders. While this remark may sound hackneyed, the fact remains that keeping organizations entrepreneurial is not well understood. Corporate entrepreneurship (CE) addresses this need for ‘opportunity seeking’ behavior of firms, but lacks comprehensiveness. While there have been good review articles on specific aspects of CE such as internal corporate venturing (Narayanan et al., 2009) and strategic renewal (Agarwal and Helfat, 2009), none covers all of CE comprehensively. It is in this context that the handbook makes an important contribution. A close study of the book helps one appreciate the subtle difference between ‘strategic’ and ‘entrepreneurial’, which is critical in CE research.
It is widely speculated that CE manifests as corporate venturing and/or strategic renewal/entrepreneurship. Viewing the subject through this typology lens, two-thirds of the book (parts 1 and 3) is dedicated to looking at the former (corporate venturing). Although one would expect the remaining one-third of the handbook to focus on strategic renewal/strategic entrepreneurship, it is handled, rather subtly, in part 2. Together the three parts comprising 10 chapters cover significant ground of knowledge generated on CE over many decades.
The first chapter in the volume is a comprehensive literature review on internal corporate venturing. The 50-page review accounts for close to five decades of research, presents a thematic overview, and raises a number of potential research questions in existing areas (pp. 46–49). It also opens up a number of new themes worthy of scholarly investigation. The relatively shorter second chapter focuses on the corporate entrepreneur. The authors use the ‘opportunity discovery-creation’ theory to define and categorize types of corporate entrepreneurs. This will probably bring more definitional clarity to who the corporate entrepreneur is and help future researchers in understanding this personality better. The third chapter builds a conceptual model of corporate opportunity identification using the human capital perspective. This well-constructed model presents propositional relationships with moderators, thus making it readily available for empirical investigation.
The four chapters in part 3 focus on corporate venture capital (CVC) and external corporate venturing. Chapter 7 provides a comprehensive review on CVC covering motives, antecedents and outcomes, from both the investor’s and investee’s perspective. The tables summarizing the review from the investor’s (pp. 220–221) and investee’s (p. 226) perspectives are both an interesting presentation and a ready reckoner. The easy to read chapter 8, uses an extreme case of CVC ‘Inno Ven’, appears like the utopian model for implementing CVC, combining the best of the corporate and the venture worlds. Large corporations around the world, which are facing the heat of disruption, will find numerous insights that they can implement ‘as-is’. Organizational learning from CVC investments is hailed as one of the most important strategic benefits but remains a black box. Chapter 9 unpacks this black box and builds a conceptual model around learning (both explorative and exploitative) from CVC. The propositions offer an opportunity for scholars to conduct empirical examination of learning from CVC experiments. The last chapter of the book is an empirical examination of a much-debated aspect of ‘corporate-startup’ relationship. The findings from this empirical study suggests that CVC activities are successful when it comes to assessing complementary ventures, but not in cases of substituting ventures. This opens up numerous questions and provides pointers on how corporations must engage with startups. It appears that successful ‘corporate-startup’ engagements need mutual benefits.
The middle three chapters (part 2) of the handbook focus on organizational renewal, particularly through a capability lens. While two of these chapters build conceptual frameworks, test them empirically and present interesting implications, the third uses a unique methodology to construct a theory to institutionalize CE. Chapter 4 builds a relational view to CE based on four alliance portfolio resource conditions (complementarity, specificity, tacitness and first-mover advantage). This presents a number of future research areas especially in today’s world where organizational boundaries are far from firm. Chapter 6 tests the implication of degree of strategic renewal/change (incremental or radical) on firm performance. The findings question the appealing notion that radical changes lead to higher performance by presenting evidence in favor of incremental changes especially during environmental upheavals. Chapter 5 is interesting in many ways – its big picture thinking on CE issues, the multidisciplinary longitudinal mixed-method research design, the fundamental questions raised and areas of future research identified – and presents a model elaborating the dynamic capabilities view to institutionalizing CE. Overall, the three chapters present enough material for anyone interested in diving deeper into ‘strategic renewal/strategic entrepreneurship’ aspect of CE.
Although there are many perspectives and lenses (opportunity creation and discovery, resource-based view, behavioral theory of the firm, learning, human capital, agency and dynamic capabilities) to viewing CE, the capability view clearly overshadows all others in this volume. Without doubt the handbook is a comprehensive review on the subject, but the most interesting idea emanating from this volume is viewing CE as a dynamic capability. How do organizations use CE to create new capabilities and/or renew existing ones remains an area, ripe for scholarly inquiry.
This edited volume by well-recognized academics is a ‘must have’ on the shelf of anyone researching/teaching CE. It is well structured, comprehensive and easily accessible with adequate references. Doctoral students and early career scholars interested in pursuing research in the myriad forms of CE will not only find this a good ‘first book’ on the subject but also discover many stimulating research questions for future exploration. The references to studies of several decades help visualize how streams within CE literature have developed over time. This well-made handbook therefore holds promise to becoming an important part of the literature, in both describing the state and defining the future of CE.