Search results

The purpose of this article is to introduce and discuss the “Entrepreneurial Health Audit”. This organizational tool is used to assess a firm's entrepreneurial intensity, diagnose organizational characteristics low in entrepreneurial intensity, and to create an understanding of the processes needed to foster a corporate entrepreneurship strategy as a means of improving organizational performance. This article is part two or a two‐part series.

Based on the existing literature, case studies, and the authors' own research and experiences with a diverse mix of companies, the paper develops a three‐stage “Entrepreneurial Health Audit.” Top‐level managers can use this tool to determine their firm's ability to act entrepreneurially at a point in time.

The paper describes how managers assess and improve their firm's entrepreneurial health. In the first stage, the “Entrepreneurial Intensity” instrument is used to measure the degree and frequency of entrepreneurship occurring within the firm. In the second stage, the “Corporate Entrepreneurship Climate Instrument” is used to identify why the firm has developed its current level of entrepreneurial intensity. Finally, the third stage of the “Entrepreneurial Health Audit” fosters commitment to a work environment supporting entrepreneurial behavior, thereby enhancing the degree and frequency of corporate entrepreneurship within the firm.

The paper raises a number of questions regarding how organizations stimulate entrepreneurial behavior and undertake organizational changes to facilitate these actions. It provides a tool top‐level managers can use across time continuously to increase their firm's ability to be entrepreneurial.

The paper demonstrates to managers how to approach the concept of entrepreneurship within an established organization, including how to diagnose characteristics constraining the firm's entrepreneurial potential and how to build commitment encouraging entrepreneurial behaviors.

The paper fills an existing void between researchers and practitioners in terms of how firms can take steps to transform their current entrepreneurial potential into the “ideal” characteristics studied in entrepreneurship research. It offers a unique organizational tool to use to assess an individual firm's potential to be entrepreneurial.

Recognizing novel entrepreneurial opportunities arising from a crisis is of paramount importance for firms. Hence, understanding the pivotal factors that facilitate firms in this endeavor holds significant value. This study delves into such factors within a representative empirical context impacted by a crisis, drawing insights from existing literature on opportunity recognition during such tumultuous periods.

The authors conducted a qualitative inspection of 14 Italian firms during the COVID-19 pandemic crisis. The authors collected a rich body of multi-source qualitative data, including 34 interviews (with senior managers and entrepreneurs) and secondary data (press releases, videos, web interviews, newspapers, reports and academic articles) in two phases (March–August 2020 and September–December 2020).

The results suggest the existence of a process model of opportunity recognition during crises based on five entrepreneurial influencing factors (entrepreneurial knowledge, entrepreneurial alertness, entrepreneurial proclivity, entrepreneurial personality and entrepreneurial purpose).

Various scholars have highlighted that, in times of crises, it is not easy and indeed very challenging for entrepreneurs to identify novel entrepreneurial opportunities. However, recent research has shown that crises can also positively impact entrepreneurs and their capacity to identify new entrepreneurial opportunities. Given these findings, not much research has analyzed the process by which entrepreneurs identify novel entrepreneurial opportunities during crises. This study shows that some entrepreneurial influencing factors are very important to identify new entrepreneurial opportunities during crises.

The importance of knowledge-based assets and the capability to leverage them has been the subject of scholarly interest in entrepreneurial orientation literature. The authors attempt to understand the dominant themes in the prior literature and propose directions for future research.

The authors performed a systematic review of 79 studies to answer the research questions: (1) What are the predominant themes in the literature on the role of intellectual capital and entrepreneurial orientation? (2) What are the potential fields of future research?

The findings suggest that current research engages the topics of intellectual capital, the capability to leverage knowledge assets and entrepreneurial orientation. The thematic analysis reveals the role of knowledge management, organizational learning, intellectual capital and absorptive capacity in entrepreneurial firms. The authors propose a theoretical model to explain how intellectual capital and its management influence firm-level entrepreneurial behavior.

Understanding the association between intellectual capital and the capability to leverage knowledge assets is crucial in a dynamic business environment. Effective deployment of knowledge is vital while searching for new entrepreneurial opportunities.

This research aims to investigate how entrepreneurial orientation influences a firm’s differentiation–cost advantage ambidexterity (DCAA) and performance indirectly through dynamic capabilities, while also investigating the impact of the interactive effect of the level and consistency of entrepreneurial orientation on dynamic capabilities. The goal of this study is to better understand the importance of consistently following an entrepreneurial orientation, as well as the linkage of such a consistently implemented strategy upon gaining both a cost and differentiation positioning enhancement.

Two empirical studies are conducted to test the proposed hypotheses – one longitudinal with multiple forms of data (i.e. text data, survey data and archival data) from 100 Taiwanese electronics firms and the other using primary data from a survey of senior managers.

Entrepreneurial orientation improves dynamic capabilities, which in turn promote superior DCAA and enhanced firm performance. In addition, as captured through a unique measure of consistency allowed through computer-aided text analysis, the results indicate that the effect of entrepreneurial orientation on dynamic capabilities is amplified when a firm consistently adopts entrepreneurial decisions and actions.

The specific context was a sample of electronics firms in Taiwan. This limits the generalization of findings, as would be possible with assessing the hypotheses in other industries.

This research clearly demonstrates the significance of consistency in pursuing a strategic orientation. The consistent support and deployment of resources facilitates an organization’s achieving positive outcomes associated with an entrepreneurial orientation.

While entrepreneurial orientation contributes to firm performance, extant knowledge on the internal process through which entrepreneurial orientation affects performance is relatively limited. The findings not only highlight the full mediating role of dynamic capabilities and DCAA, but also shed light on the importance of consistency in entrepreneurial orientation over time.

The purpose of this study is to explore the principal research query and whether strategic foresight deployed by entrepreneurial firms in energy transition aims at crafting future readiness.

With a focus on entrepreneurial firms working in the alternative energy segment in the Indian context, the intent is to examine the deployment of strategic foresight by incumbent firms and their entrepreneurial journey. The authors have adopted the approach of Eisenhardt for this research. The area of interest for the authors entailing strategic foresight by entrepreneurial firms in energy transition aligns with defining features reflecting the aim of Eisenhardt method for this exploratory research coupled with constructivism.

While the future scenarios in the energy sector have to be necessarily multiple, their alignment with different geographic, economic, demographic and political outlooks shall be defined by the pathways niched through the deployment of strategic foresight for arriving at those scenarios.

Strategic foresight deployed by entrepreneurial firms has the potential to create future readiness through self-reliant sustainable economic value chains for local populace, thus propagating holistic development in remote regions.

This paper attempts to knit together the domains of strategic foresight, entrepreneurial firms and energy transition through case research and present the future thinking deployed for navigation in uncharted pathways by capturing the foresight component of these incumbent firms chosen through careful case selection. The narrative has been strengthened by the varied interviews across participants and the observations made by the authors during the research work.

The purpose of this paper is to understand firm‐level entrepreneurship in diverse organizational contexts and explain its relationship with organizational factors.

The paper adopts a multiple‐case research design. In‐depth interviews are conducted with key informants in four cases. In each case, a firm‐level entrepreneurial story is focused on to understand the entrepreneurial process within its organizational context.

The findings show that there are two types of entrepreneurial activities in organizations – beyond‐boundary focus and within‐boundary focus. They exhibit different patterns regarding their relationship with organizational factors – top management leadership, strategic orientation, organizational culture, internal mechanisms and organizational performance.

Generalizability of the results may be limited due to the case study design of this research.

Top management leadership has a vital role in influencing entrepreneurial activity in organizations. When an organizational environment that favours entrepreneurship is supported by top management, then business‐level entrepreneurial activities are cultivated across the company. But if the organizational environment does not favour entrepreneurship, then entrepreneurial activity is mostly limited to the corporate level and only initiated by top management.

The multiple case analyses provide an extensive analysis of the organizational context and firm‐level entrepreneurship. Additionally, the emergent categories of two different types of entrepreneurial activities serve as a major and relevant step to reduce the ambiguity present in the field of study.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the correlations among entrepreneurial environment, market-oriented strategies, and entrepreneurial performance.

Entrepreneurial environment is measured by institutional environment and industrial environment. A survey of 176 large Chinese automobile firms is conducted. The structural equation model is applied to perform analysis.

The uncertainty of the institutional environment is positively related with market-oriented strategies and market-oriented strategies are positively related with firms’ performance. The stronger the uncertainty of the industrial environment is, the larger impact that market-oriented strategies have on firms’ performance will be. There is no distinct positive relationship between the uncertainty of industrial environment and firms’ market-oriented strategies. The hypothesis, that the stronger the uncertainty of institutional environments is, the larger the impact that market-oriented strategies will be on firms’ performance, is not supported.

In terms of research design, this paper does not select survey samples randomly. This paper only takes institutional and industrial environments into consideration while the environmental characteristics are omitted.

This paper expands entrepreneurship research by integrating previous studies. Findings in this paper are helpful for firms in emerging countries to implement “going abroad strategies,” to start up new businesses in other countries, and to achieve the goals of improving competitiveness and integrating with international firms.

Organizational researchers have long recognized the important role that top managers play within entrepreneurial firms (Ireland, Hitt and Sirmon 2003). Utilizing Covin and Slevin’s (1989) conceptual framework, the current study explores three key entrepreneurial characteristics of top managers and the impact these characteristics have on firm performance. Specifically, we argue that top managers with a high tolerance of risk, those who favor innovative activities and those who display a high degree of proactiveness will positively impact firm performance. In addition, this study examines the influence of top managers’ prestige, structural and expert power on the relationship between entrepreneurial orientation and firm performance. We conclude the study with a discussion of theoretical and practical implications of our findings and suggestions for future research in this area of study.

There is a lack of research on the link between the personal disposition of an entrepreneurial firm's founder, the firm's strategic orientation and its performance outcomes. Also, there is a lack of cross-national research on entrepreneurial firms’ strategic orientations. This paper seeks to address these gaps by exploring the differences in strategic orientation choices and their performance outcomes for American and Japanese entrepreneurial firms, focusing on founders’ achievement motivation as a key personal disposition.

A survey was conducted among 397 Japanese founders and 189 American ones.

This paper's key counterintuitive finding is that Japanese and American founders of entrepreneurial firms are more similar than is often suggested. The paper first finds that in both Japan and the US, achievement motivation is positively related to customer orientation and cost orientation while not being related to technological orientation. Second, it is found that the adoption of customer orientation is positively related to the profitability of both Japanese and American entrepreneurial firms, although the effect is stronger in the US. It is also found that the adoption of technology orientation is negatively related to the profitability of both Japanese and American firms, although the effect is less negative in Japan. Finally, it is found that the adoption of cost orientation does not have an impact on the profitability of either Japanese or American entrepreneurial firms.

This is one of the first studies to examine how founders of entrepreneurial firms use their personal disposition to shape the strategic orientation of their firm.

This study aims to use dynamic capability theory to investigate the effect of entrepreneurial orientation and dynamic capabilities (DC) on the firm’s entrepreneurial performance through strategic entrepreneurship (SE).

To address the research objective, the authors obtained data from larger organisations operating in an emerging Pakistani economy.

Findings reveal that, in emerging markets, DC are essential elements that influence the organisation’s opportunity-seeking and advantage-seeking behaviours to ensure the firm’s entrepreneurial performance.

The present study implies that training is needed for the managers and team leaders of emerging market corporates to think entrepreneurially by revising the strategic goals of the corporate.

SE-based executive training should also be compulsory for the top management teams, including the board of directors for larger firms.

SE is a critically important business concept and should be taught in the emerging market’s business schools as a course at the graduate level.

This paper strengthens entrepreneurship literature by using a unique context of an emerging market and suggests a unique SE-based framework for the firms operating in emerging markets.