Effects of the Use and Coordination of Multiple Corporate Entrepreneurship Units

Abstract

Corporate Entrepreneurship (CE) has become an established tool to create discontinuous innovations for many established companies. Thus, they have started to implement multiple CE units in parallel. However, despite different positive effects potentially arising from the parallel use and purposeful coordination of CE units, managers and scholars alike have so far widely ignored such holistic perspectives. This study therefore wants to shed light on the effects the parallel use and coordination have on established companies' innovation performance. Following an explorative approach, it investigates quantitatively the relationships between the number of CE units as well as their heterogeneity (in terms of their forms) used by a company and companies' innovativeness. Further, it employs qualitative interview data to gain deeper insights into the effects. Interestingly, the results show that the mere number of CE units does not have a significant effect on the innovativeness, but that more heterogeneous sets of CE units do. This provides an argument for the strategic coordination and co-specialization of CE units in order to make use of positive effects associated with multiple CE units. The study thereby contributes both to Asset Orchestration theory and the CE literature and provides multiple managerial implications as well as different avenues for future research.