Corporate Entrepreneurship: Sensing and Seizing Opportunities for a Prosperous Research Agenda

Corporate entrepreneurship has been widely acknowledged by scholars and executives alike as an effective means for revitalizing organizations and improving their financial performance. Spurring entrepreneurship and exploration within established organizations, however, remains a big challenge facing today’s businesses. As organizations grow and age over time, like with people in general, they tend to become set in their ways of thinking, learning, managing and acting– they become less flexible and less willing to sense and seize new opportunities. Moreover, there is little doubt that mindsets and organizational attributes needed for exploration and leveraging new opportunities are radically different from those needed for smoothening ongoing operations, making their simultaneous pursuit within an organization rather difficult. Given its importance for future sustainable growth, scholars have yet to uncover how organizations may reconcile conflicting demands and resolve challenges associated with corporate entrepreneurship’s emphasis on leveraging both existing as well as new opportunities ‘out there’ .

The aim of this inaugural address is to draw the foundations and to identify emergent opportunities for moving research on corporate entrepreneurship forward. It considers the challenges associated with corporate entrepreneurship and details important organizational and managerial features of successful organizations that span different levels of analysis. The inaugural address concludes that such a multilevel approach generates valuable new research avenues underlying  a prosperous research agenda.

Contact information:

Marianne Schouten

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