Corporate Entrepreneurship: where are we? Where can we go from here?

Summary This Unplugged issue of M@n@gement is dedicated to the topic of Corporate Entrepreneurship and is titled: Corporate Entrepreneurship: where are we? Where can we go from here? An international workshop was organized in Lyon on June 20-21st, 2011 and brought together about fifty researchers. The aim of this workshop was to discuss the results of recent works in Corporate Entrepreneurship research. To this end, we asked four researchers to do a state of the field and to share their vision of the rising promising research questions. The philosophy of this workshop was very much in line with that of the Unplugged series. We wanted it to be, to quote Josserand (Clegg & Starbuck, 2009), “a wild card to share their own perspective on novel ways in which to conceive of management today”. In the field of corporate entrepreneurship research, we are currently witnessing lively scientific debate around the Entrepreneurial Orientation (EO) construct and the interactions between strategy and entrepreneurship. During the workshop, we embraced the distinction between advances in science (that we make by asking good questions) and scientific discovery (that we make by questioning what we think we know). This Unplugged includes three parts:In part one, we present “The Evolution and Contributions of Corporate Entrepreneurship Research”, a state of the field of knowledge in the field. We retrace the field’s first steps and offer an agenda for research. At the intersection of strategic management and entrepreneurship lies the study of corporate entrepreneurship (CE), a phrase coined by Peterson and Burger (Peterson & Berger, 1971). CE is important for the field of general management (and thus the readers of M@n@gement) because it addresses entrepreneurship at the level of the firm (Miller, 1983), depending upon, yet going beyond, the entrepreneurial behaviors of the individuals that compose it. CE has been studied through its consequences (Guth & Ginsberg, 1990), through the prism of individual behaviors (Burgelman, 1983) and by investigating how companies organize for these activities (Kanter, 1985). The impact of national culture, meanwhile, has been studied relatively little (Hayton, George, & Zahra, 2002). Instead, the field has convened around other concepts applied to a corporate, organizational setting, such as opportunity recognition (O’Connor & Rice, 2001). Zahra et al note that the field is taking distance from the strategy literature, where CE has become overshadowed by the concept of entrepreneurial orientation, a strategic orientation akin to Market Orientation (Gotteland, Haon, & Jolibert, 2009), to embrace other questions. Our suggested research agenda first identifies the many classifications of CE that have been proposed. We note that the factors that lead to this variety have yet to be identified. Further research can fruitfully examine, amongst other topics: knowledge creation and integration, contextual factors such as national culture, markets (emerging or mature) and social entrepreneurship as well as inter-organizational manifestations of CE. The micro-foundations of these phenomena bring with them rather interesting questions: which individual behaviors lead to these organizational behaviors? How are they intertwined? How can HRM practices induce such behaviors? The keys to answering these issues, which can hopefully be offered by context, have yet to be discovered.