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To innovatively address challenges faced by corporate entrepreneurship (CE) in this modern age of globalization and digitalization, this chapter takes a fresh look at questions of learning and leadership from the perspective of organization development (OD), a field that has long studied questions of planned and emergent change. This alternate perspective adds to our knowledge and understanding of the role of individuals and teams in CE and presents opportunities to integrate learning and leadership. In particular, the OD literature provides us with multilevel measurement methods and tools to better analyze the employee and team level-of-analysis. As a result, these insights should enable us to better explain the interaction between CE strategic orientation and the performance of corporate venturing employees and teams, as well as the progress of organizational strategic renewal and market (re)creation efforts.

Entrepreneurial orientation (EO) has emerged as a core concept in the field of entrepreneurship. Yet, there continue to be questions about the nature of EO and how best to conceptualize and measure it. This chapter makes the case that EO has grown beyond its roots as a firm-level unidimensional strategy construct and that a new multidimensional version of EO is needed to capture the diverse manifestations and venues for entrepreneurial activity that are now evident around the world – global entrepreneurial orientation (GEO). Building on the five-dimension multidimensional view of EO set forth when Lumpkin and Dess (1996) extended the work of Miller (1983) and Covin and Slevin (1989, 1991), the chapter offers an updated definition of EO and a fresh interpretation of why EO matters theoretically. Despite earnest efforts to reconcile the different approaches to EO, in order to move the study of EO and the theoretical conversation about it forward, we maintain that as a group of scholars and a field, we need to acknowledge that two different versions of EO have emerged. Given that, we consider original approaches to measuring EO, evaluate formative measurement models, consider multiple levels of analysis, call for renewed attention to EO configurations, and discuss whether there is a theory of EO.

The present study examines entrepreneurship in established firms holistically and critically. The authors start by reviewing previous research and highlight a variety of definitional, conceptual, methodological, contextual, and temporal factors that have been confounding the research. The authors then present a multidimensional framework that specifies a more nuanced picture of the determinants, motives, activities, and consequences of corporate in established firms. Finally, the authors discuss conceptual, methodological, and practical implications, as well as outline future research avenues.

A corporate entrepreneurship (CE) strategy implies that a firm’s strategic intent is to continuously leverage entrepreneurial opportunities for growth- and advantage-seeking purposes. CE has gained greater research attention with a focus on the factors that influence an organization’s willingness to initiate and sustain a CE strategy. In the current disruptive age, firms acknowledge the importance of CE (also referred to as corporate innovation) as the critical element for sustained competitive advantage in the global economy. Yet, so many organizations struggle with the actual implementation of an innovative strategy. There are key challenges that must be addressed by today’s corporate entrepreneurial leaders in this age of disruptive innovation. These include framing the innovation, developing the internal architecture, coordinating the managerial levels, integrating design thinking, recognizing the grief associated with project failure, and demanding ethical standards. As research on corporate innovative activity has evolved, numerous researchers have acknowledged the importance of these leadership activities to enhance the effectiveness of corporate entrepreneurial activity. In this chapter, the authors discuss these critical elements confronting corporate entrepreneurial leaders.

Today, newly founded businesses are inevitably driven to start in a digital form from day 1. Moreover, most existing businesses conceive digitalization as an important part of their strategic orientation by developing and improving their digital assets and digitalizing their processes. By taking account of this development, this chapter investigates how entrepreneurial orientation (EO) affects a small firm’s proclivity to both digitization and internationalization and their performance that comes from it. Internationalization has been a key topic for many small- and medium-sized companies (SMEs) over the past decades. As digitization is currently taking over the helm from internationalization as the most pressing topic affecting business, we carried out research among SMEs to understand the interplay of these factors influencing business performance. The focus of the research was on the precursory factors inducing firm performance as well as on their interrelationships. Using a sample of 357 SMEs, EO is found to be significantly closely associated with an SME’s degree of digitization as well as with its overall performance. In contrast, EO does not affect the SME’s level of internationalization. This result is surprising considering that proactive and risk-taking firms tend to be more inclined to enter foreign and distant markets.

This study investigates the impact of socioemotional wealth (SEW) on family firm entrepreneurial orientation (EO) in Saudi Arabia, and the moderating effect of generational involvement on this relationship. Our data set comprises 241 privately, wholly owned family firms. We examine EO as a strategic orientation expressed in terms of both firm behavior and how managers approach risk-taking attitudinally. Our study finds that SEW is positively related to firms’ entrepreneurial behavior, but not managerial attitudes toward risk-taking. However, the positive effects of SEW on firms’ entrepreneurial behavior diminish as the number of generations involved in the family business increases. The broader implications for enabling entrepreneurship within Arab transforming economies adhering to strong cultural tribalistic norms are discussed.

Recent studies have questioned the direct relationship between entrepreneurial orientation (EO) and firm performance (e.g., Rauch, Wiklund, Lumpkin, & Frese, 2009; Wales, Gupta, & Mousa, 2013). Following this stream of research, this study examines this relationship by identifying the intermediate steps between these two variables (Alegre & Chiva, 2013; Wales, 2016; Zahra, Sapienza, & Davidsson, 2006). EO is considered essential for new market entry and new business foundation, which is why this study focuses on startups. Startups search for viable business opportunities, and this search is highly dependent on organizational learning (Kreiser, 2011). Previous studies suggest that organizational learning mediates the relationship between EO and performance (e.g., Real, Roldan, & Leal, 2014; Wang, 2008). This study investigates the role of organizational learning in this relationship by analyzing how EO and absorptive capacity (AC) interact. We propose a more direct and fine-grained measure of entrepreneurial success by developing a conceptual model that includes opportunity identification as an early outcome measure for startups. Drawing on a sample of 95 academic spin-offs in the Netherlands, this study examines the mediating role of AC and market readiness in the relationship between EO and market opportunities. The findings indicate that AC and market readiness mediate the direct effect of EO on market opportunity identification. By using opportunity identification as an outcome measure for EO, this study adopts a more direct measure for firm performance, resonating with recent discussions on the main effect of EO for organizations. These findings suggest that academic spin-offs’ AC leads entrepreneurial efforts to achieve a better product-market fit, and in return, helps to identify more market opportunities.

Using administrative, longitudinal data on felony arrests in Florida, we exploit the discontinuous increase in the punitiveness of criminal sanctions at 18 to estimate the deterrence effect of incarceration. Our analysis suggests a 2% decline in the log-odds of offending at 18, with standard errors ruling out declines of 11% or more. We interpret these magnitudes using a stochastic dynamic extension of Becker’s (1968) model of criminal behavior. Calibrating the model to match key empirical moments, we conclude that deterrence elasticities with respect to sentence lengths are no more negative than − 0 . 13 for young offenders.