Corporate Entrepreneurship : A Rising Field of Research

Schulze, Arndt and Dada, Lola (2022) Corporate Entrepreneurship : A Rising Field of Research. PhD thesis, Lancaster University.

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Abstract

Corporate entrepreneurship (CE) involves strategic entrepreneurship (SE) and corporate venturing (CV). This research centers on three topics, exploring SE and CV, via three related papers. The first paper focuses on exploring SE through a systematic literature review, thereby evaluating its dynamic micro-foundations and the interlinked exploration and exploitation processes while unveiling future research avenues. The second paper examines how CV affects knowledge acquisition (KA) and performance, and investigates how this relationship is influenced by the external environment and transformational leadership. The third paper examines how SE relates to employee retention and recruitment, and tests how competition and corporate reputation moderate the aforementioned relationship. Novel data of small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) in the United Kingdom and Germany are used to address the research questions. The study reveals that CV positively influences KA and performance. Furthermore, the study shows that technological turbulence and transformational leadership positively moderate the relationship between CV and performance. The study also confirms a strong effect of SE on both employee retention and recruitment. It further affirms that the relationship between SE and employee retention is strengthened when firms operate in competitively intensive environments. In all, this thesis contributes to extant research by developing and validating direct reflective measurement scales for CV and SE thereby also paving the way to further explore the domain of CE.