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Public entrepreneurship is much like its private sector counterpart; however, public entrepreneurs face additional challenges due to weaker competitive forces in the public as compared to private sector, with objectives that often are poorly defined and performance that is difficult to measure. Despite the impact on public good, how to enact changes successfully in public sector organizations to be more entrepreneurial is poorly understood. This article summarizes current research on public entrepreneurship and presents a detailed case study of a successful entrepreneurial change in a public sector organization. A five-step change process used to enhance entrepreneurial behaviors was implemented in a public sector organization and the qualitative and quantitative results demonstrated substantial performance improvements over 4 years (i.e., quantitative performance in some areas was more than 10 times greater). We explain key steps that produced successful outcomes and how to avoid common challenges in the implementation of ongoing entrepreneurial behaviors in public sector contexts.

Corporate entrepreneurship strategy (CES) represents a firm’s coordinated efforts towards entrepreneurship and is an over-arching strategic approach that may be suitable for diverse types of organizations and industries. Yet, it remains on the knowledge frontier because the actual implementation of this strategy remains a challenge for many organizations. CES is built upon three internal elements: an entrepreneurial strategic vision, a pro-entrepreneurship organizational architecture, and entrepreneurial processes and behaviors. We integrate CES with the precepts of configuration theory to extend our knowledge boundaries in order to suggest a proper alignment of these elements for successful CES implementation. By examining the relationship between external CES fit (conceptualized and operationalized as ‘matched’ linkages between the external environment and the internal elements of CES) and internal CES fit (conceptualized and operationalized as aligning the internal elements of CES in a manner consistent with a specified ‘ideal’ profile), as well as the relationship between internal CES fit and firm performance, our results suggest that the fit of these elements is associated with greater financial performance.

The competitive dynamics literature offers important insights regarding competitive behavior; however, the critical question of how previously nonrival firms become more direct competitors remains unanswered. To address this question, we extend the strategic entrepreneurship construct to develop a theory-based model of competitive landscape shifts. We theorize that firms engaging in strategic entrepreneurship will be better able to recognize entrepreneurial opportunities outside of their competitive domain(s), which will enable them to enact radical competitive actions. In turn, radical competitive actions will lead to shifts where these firms increase their market commonality with competitors with dissimilar resources and/or decrease their market commonality with competitors with similar resources. In developing our model of competitive landscape shifts, we also consider several important boundary conditions that influence the proposed relationships.

The explosion of crowdfunding within entrepreneurial circles is attracting increased academic interest in the nature of crowdfunding, its antecedents, and its consequences. In an effort to help researchers concentrate their inquiry on the most promising questions and theories involving crowdfunding, we surveyed key thought leaders within the entrepreneurship field—the Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice editorial review board—regarding what inquiry they believe is needed. Their responses offer implications for crowdfunding research. For example, cross–disciplinary work is one approach that board members believe holds high potential. In response, we outline a cross–disciplinary research agenda that can inform scholarly efforts.

Crowdfunding is a rapidly growing phenomenon wherein entrepreneurs seek funding for their entrepreneurial activities from a potentially large audience of interested individuals. Crowdfunding has exploded in popularity over the last decade and now accounts for tens of billions of dollars annually. But despite the importance and growth of crowdfunding, little scholarly knowledge exists about the topic. To address this gap, this special issue includes five articles that each advance knowledge about crowdfunding in important ways. We briefly review past work on crowdfunding in leading entrepreneurship and management journals. We then highlight the diverse contributions offered in the special issue articles.

Research summary Entrepreneurs develop innovations, fulfill customer needs, and spur economic growth by recognizing, evaluating, and exploiting opportunities. Despite progress, scholarly understanding of how entrepreneurs achieve these objectives may be incomplete. For instance, little explanation exists for why entrepreneurs may pursue activities seemingly at random, nor is there a clear endpoint to the entrepreneurship process. To address these concerns, we present a framework that integrates sensemaking and structuration perspectives to specify the cognitive and behavioral influences on the entrepreneurship process. Within this framework, entrepreneurs ultimately pursue opportunities through developing and deploying capabilities to create value for customers. Managerial summary While entrepreneurs' initial insights regarding innovations and customer needs are important, these insights are only the beginning of an interactive, iterative path that ends with the formation of an organization that can reliably produce value for customers. One of entrepreneurs' most important tools along this path is their set of scripts. Scripts help define how entrepreneurs act and interact so they can fully understand market needs and develop the means for solving these needs. In this paper, our objective is to describe how these scripts help entrepreneurs do the hard work of thinking and acting to effectively create new venture capabilities and to explain how entrepreneurs, who may possess similar sets of scripts, may nevertheless conceptualize different opportunities and solutions.

Scholarly attention to strategy and entrepreneurship within the informal economy appears to be on the rise, but a large gap remains between the importance of the informal economy and the amount of research that is devoted to it. The survey reported herein is an effort to offer insights to researchers who wish to help build the knowledge base about strategy and entrepreneurship within the informal economy. Specifically, we surveyed members of the Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal's editorial board regarding what they view as the most promising theories, research questions, and methods to leverage in order to develop greater understanding of the informal economy. Board members' views vary, but in general institutional theory and network theory are seen as the best perspectives to fuel major contributions at this time. The research questions that attracted the strongest support centered on the boundaries of and interchanges between the formal and informal economies. Finally, field interviews, case studies, and ethnography were ranked as the most promising investigative methods. Taken together, these findings offer a possible agenda for research into the informal economy. Copyright © 2014 Strategic Management Society.

The informal economy consists of business activities that occur outside of formal institutional boundaries but within the boundaries of informal institutions. A large gap exists between the significant importance of the informal economy to commerce around the world and the small amount of informal economy research with which entrepreneurship and strategic management scholars have been involved. As a step toward filling this gap, this special issue includes four articles with the potential to significantly advance our understanding of business activities within the informal economy. In introducing these four articles, we discuss the myriad activities that fall within the boundaries of the informal economy and distinguish between the institutional foundations of informality in developed versus developing economies. The articles included within the special issue each offer a unique understanding of how entrepreneurs are influenced by and manage their institutional contexts in various informal economy settings, providing contributions that should give rise to a series of promising future research questions. Copyright © 2014 Strategic Management Society.

Individuals living in poverty remain a critical issue. This special issue focuses on how entrepreneurship can help to solve such poverty. Rather than viewing those in poverty as a market for goods, the solution lies in understanding how to help those living in poverty create their own businesses. Ultimately, entrepreneurship among those in poverty will create a long lasting solution to their poverty. Herein, we initially examine the extant knowledge about entrepreneurship. We then examine where future research on this important topic should move. Finally, we introduce the five articles that make up this special issue. These five articles came from the initial 71 submissions and enhance our knowledge about entrepreneurship as a pathway to reducing poverty.

The informal economy consists of economic activities that occur outside of formal institutional boundaries but which remain within informal institutional boundaries for large segments of society. We draw from diverse disciplines to frame research concerning entrepreneurship in the informal economy around three separate theories: institutional theory, motivation-related theories from a sociological perspective, and resource allocation theory. Each of these theories provides a complementary lens through which to examine the incentives, constraints, motivations, strategies, and abilities of entrepreneurs to operate and grow their ventures in the informal economy. Employing these theoretical perspectives facilitates efforts to highlight the breadth of informal economy research in different domains and lays foundations for future entrepreneurship research.

Executive Overview The foci of strategic entrepreneurship (SE) are broad and rich, building on research from multiple disciplines such as economics, psychology, and sociology, along with other subdisciplines in management including organizational behavior and organization theory. Herein, we examine the contributions of strategic management and entrepreneurship to SE. Building on a previous model of SE, we develop an input-process-output model to extend our understanding of the SE construct. We examine the resource inputs into SE, such as individual knowledge and skills. In addition, we explore the resource orchestration processes that are important for SE and the outcomes, including creating value for customers, building wealth for stockholders, and creating benefits for other stakeholders, especially for society at large. Individual entrepreneurs also benefit through financial wealth, but other outcomes such as personal satisfaction and fulfillment of personal needs (e.g., self-actualization) may be of e...

Signaling theory is useful for describing behavior when two parties (individuals or organizations) have access to different information. Typically, one party, the sender, must choose whether and how to communicate (or signal) that information, and the other party, the receiver, must choose how to interpret the signal. Accordingly, signaling theory holds a prominent position in a variety of management literatures, including strategic management, entrepreneurship, and human resource management. While the use of signaling theory has gained momentum in recent years, its central tenets have become blurred as it has been applied to organizational concerns. The authors, therefore, provide a concise synthesis of the theory and its key concepts, review its use in the management literature, and put forward directions for future research that will encourage scholars to use signaling theory in new ways and to develop more complex formulations and nuanced variations of the theory.

A firm engages in strategic entrepreneurship when it simultaneously pursues exploration for future business domains and exploitation of current domains. Superior performance often results from successful strategic entrepreneurship. A growing body of literature addresses the opportunities and challenges created when a firm attempts to stand out in both exploration and exploitation. To date, however, this literature has focused on strategic entrepreneurship without distinguishing the role of family involvement. We seek to address this gap by theorizing that family involvement, shaped by four key dimensions of identity, justice, nepotism, and conflict, creates differences in the nature of strategic entrepreneurship between family-controlled and non-family firms. Based on these four dimensions, we develop a set of propositions describing potential positive and negative implications for strategic entrepreneurship in family-controlled firms.

Entrepreneurship is a relatively young field; nonetheless, the research in this domain has been growing at an impressive rate in recent decades. As is commonly the case with emerging fields, entrepreneurship research currently faces a number of opportunities and challenges. Overall, entrepreneurship has an opportunity to establish itself as a field whose methodological rigor matches that of neighboring fields such as organizational behavior and strategic management, but some key challenges stand in the way of completing this endeavor. Herein, we outline the challenges that emerged from an informal survey of editorial board members of Organizational Research Methods (ORM) about the state of entrepreneurship research methods. We then discuss how the articles included in the feature topic on research methods in entrepreneurship hold great promises for resolving these challenges.

Opportunity is a central concept within the entrepreneurship field, and there is now a critical mass of literature centered on the concept. The authors seek to make two main contributions to this literature. First, we provide a detailed review of research on the opportunity concept and the processes surrounding it, highlighting extant insights and future needs. Second, we describe ways that the entrepreneurship literature’s insights about the opportunity concept could be enhanced by research in other fields, both inside and outside business-related domains.

Managing uncertainty effectively is perhaps one of the most significant challenges a firm's decision makers face today. Strategic entrepreneurship—defined as exploration for future sources of competitive advantage, combined with exploitation of current sources of competitive advantage—has been proposed as a means via which decision makers can manage uncertainty. In this article, we discuss the transition between exploration and exploitation activities within organizations as a vital part of strategic entrepreneurship; this transition process can involve various types of internal firm challenges. Additionally, we highlight various sources for these internal challenges and mechanisms through which firms can overcome them.

The entrepreneurial process drives economic activities in the formal economy; however, little is known theoretically about how the entrepreneurial process works in the informal economy. To address this theoretical gap, we employ a multilevel perspective integrating entrepreneurship theory (microlevel) with institutional (macrolevel) and collective identity (mesolevel) theories to examine the role institutions and collective identity play in the recognition and exploitation of opportunities in the informal economy. Additionally, we explore factors that influence the transition to the formal economy.

Although base of the pyramid markets are significant sources of entrepreneurial opportunities, the nature of entrepreneurship in these markets is not well understood. Additionally, these markets remain largely underserved by multinational enterprises (MNEs). Given theoretical and practical gaps associated with these issues, we integrate entrepreneurship, institutional, and network theories to discuss how the entrepreneurship process of MNEs is negatively affected in base of the pyramid markets. We then explain how partnerships with nongovernment organizations (NGOs) can offset such negative effects due to NGOs‘ high degree of localized knowledge, social embeddedness within multiple informal networks, and ambidexterity in dealing with diverse stakeholder groups. Both economic and social benefits can result from such partnerships.

Our knowledge of corporate entrepreneurship (CE) continues to expand. However, this knowledge remains quite fragmented and non–cumulative. Herein, we conceptualize CE strategy as a useful focal point for integrating and synthesizing key elements within CE's intellectual domain. The components of our CE strategy model include (1) the antecedents of CE strategy (i.e., individual entrepreneurial cognitions of the organization's members and external environmental conditions that invite entrepreneurial activity), (2) the elements of CE strategy (i.e., top management's entrepreneurial strategic vision for the firm, organizational architectures that encourage entrepreneurial processes and behavior, and the generic forms of entrepreneurial process that are reflected in entrepreneurial behavior), and (3) the outcomes of CE strategy (i.e., organizational outcomes resulting from entrepreneurial actions, including the development of competitive capability and strategic repositioning). We discuss how our model contributes to the CE literature, distinguish our model from prior models, and identify challenges future CE research should address.

Following the collapse of socialism in the late 1980s, Central and Eastern European countries initiated attempts to adopt capitalist economic frameworks and promote entrepreneurship. However, persistent economic difficulties and high levels of unemployment have led to dissatisfaction with political parties favoring capitalism. We integrate identity, institutional, and social movement theories to describe the emergence of four competing social movements (capitalist democracy, socialist command, social democracy, and populist command) that are undertaken to pursue politico–economic reforms. We discuss the implications for developing an entrepreneurial culture in Central and Eastern Europe.

Strategic entrepreneurship refers to firms' pursuit of superior performance via simultaneous opportunity-seeking and advantage-seeking activities. Both small and large firms face impediments while pursuing strategic entrepreneurship. While small firms' opportunity-seeking skills may be strong, their limited knowledge stocks and lack of market power inhibit their ability to enact the competitive advantages necessary to appropriate value from opportunities the firms choose to pursue. In contrast, large firms are skilled at establishing competitive advantages, but their heavy emphasis on the efficiency of their existing businesses often undermines their ability to continuously explore for additional opportunities. Building on a variety of theories, including network, learning, resource-based, and real options, we suggest that collaborative innovation can enable both types of firms to overcome their respective challenges. Collaborative innovation is the pursuit of innovations across firm boundaries through the sharing of ideas, knowledge, expertise, and opportunities. For small firms, we contend that pursuing entrepreneurship collaboratively allows them to preserve their creativity and flexibility while mitigating the inherent liabilities of smallness. We argue that collaborative innovation permits large firms to exploit their advantage-creating skills while concurrently exploring for opportunities outside their current domain. Thus, small and large firms that learn how to integrate strategic entrepreneurship and collaborative innovation are well positioned to create wealth. Copyright © 2008 Strategic Management Society.

The eclectic and pervasive benefits of entrepreneurship are generating research questions that interest scholars in a variety of disciplines. These questions have been primarily examined within the context of a scholar's home discipline while ignoring insights from other disciplines. This approach has left entrepreneurship research as a widely dispersed, loosely connected domain of issues. In this review, the authors explore entrepreneurship research in accounting, anthropology, economics, finance, management, marketing, operations management, political science, psychology, and sociology. They seek to identify common interests that can serve as a bridge for scholars interested in using a multitheoretic and multimethodological lens to design and complete entrepreneurship studies.

In today's fast-paced competitive environment, firms face the need to be increasingly nimble and adaptive. While often able to establish a certain level of performance based upon existing technologies, firms are equally as often to be left flat-footed in the face of emerging, novel technologies. We discuss strategic entrepreneurship as the means through which firms simultaneously exploit their current competitive advantages while exploring for future opportu- nities. Achieving a balance between exploration and exploitation consists of more than merely allocating resources evenly between the two processes. As discussed, exploration and exploitation are operationally, structurally, and culturally distinct processes.

Strategic supply chains serve as a potential source of competitive advantage for firms. The ability of a strategy supply chain to engender cultural competitiveness, or joint entrepreneurship and learning aimed at filling market gaps, is a key path through which a strategic supply chain may become a competitive advantage. A balance of trust and power within the supply chain offsets uncertainty and risks associated with the behaviors underlying cultural competitiveness. Using a multi-theoretic perspective, we discuss four strategies that firms use to balance a climate of trust and power in a strategic supply chain. Identifying an authority, generating a common supply chain identity, utilizing boundary spanning ties, and providing procedural and interactive justice are the strategies we discuss.

PurposeIdentifies issues to consider when designing a corporate entrepreneurship strategy, discuss the triggers of corporate entrepreneurship, and describe an internal work environment that supports corporate entrepreneurship.Design/methodology/approachBased on the extant literature, case studies, and the authors' experiences with a diverse mix of companies, the nature and importance of a corporate entrepreneurship strategy is described, together with insights into the internal and external factors that facilitate corporate entrepreneurship and a strategy used to support it.FindingsThe ability to foster high levels of entrepreneurial intensity and formulate effective corporate entrepreneurship strategy is associated with key elements of the organizational climate. Four major climate variables are assessed. Conclusions are drawn regarding the value an entrepreneurial mindset creates when used in established firms.Research implicationsRaises a number of questions regarding the role of strategic versus non‐strategic approaches to encouraging entrepreneurship and innovation in larger, established companies, as well as the relative importance of differing triggering events and various climate variables in influencing a successful corporate entrepreneurship strategy.Practical implicationsDemonstrates to managers how to strategically approach the concept of entrepreneurship within a larger organization, including how to design an internal work environment that is conducive to encouraging employees to act on their innate entrepreneurial potential.Originality/valueFulfills a missing gap in terms of how established firms can make entrepreneurship a core element of their approaches to strategic management and offers practical insights into some of the more vital factors that contribute to sustainable levels of entrepreneurship in established firms.

Middle–level managers’ entrepreneurial behavior is linked to successful corporate entrepreneurship. Herein, we integrate knowledge about corporate entrepreneurship and middle–level managers’ behaviors to develop and explore a conceptual model. The model depicts the organizational antecedents of middle–level managers’ entrepreneurial behavior, the entrepreneurial actions describing that behavior, and outcomes of that behavior as well as factors influencing its continuance. Following discussion of the model's contents, we describe its potential value for researchers and those engaging in corporate entrepreneurship.

Strategic entrepreneurship (SE) involves simultaneous opportunity-seeking and advantage-seeking behaviors and results in superior firm performance. On a relative basis, small, entrepreneurial ventures are effective in identifying opportunities but are less successful in developing competitive advantages needed to appropriate value from those opportunities. In contrast, large, established firms often are relatively more effective in establishing competitive advantages but are less able to identify new opportunities. We argue that SE is a unique, distinctive construct through which firms are able to create wealth. An entrepreneurial mindset, an entrepreneurial culture and entrepreneurial leadership, the strategic management of resources and applying creativity to develop innovations are important dimensions of SE. Herein we develop a model of SE that explains how these dimensions are integrated to create wealth.

Increasingly, companies are using alliances and joint ventures to pursue entrepreneurial opportunities. These collaborations are voluntary arrangements between two or more firms that exchange, share, bundle, and create resources in pursuit of entrepreneurial opportunities. This paper proposes that the innovativeness and risk characteristics of these entrepreneurial collaborations significantly influence the outcomes that partner firms realize. Furthermore, interfirm trust works to moderate the effects of these characteristics and allows partners to effectively manage these arrangements. Using data from a sample of alliances and joint ventures engaged in new product development in the telecommunications, medical, and electronics industries, we empirically test the effects of these characteristics on partner satisfaction and partnership success.

This article discusses the antecedents, elements, and consequences of corporate entrepreneurship. Corporate entrepreneurship strategy is increasingly recognized as a strategic option firms choose t...

Research on corporate entrepreneurship (CE) has grown rapidly over the past decade. In this article, we identify four major issues scholars can pursue to further our understanding about CE. The issues we explore include various forms of CE (e.g., sustained regeneration, domain redefinition) and their implications for organizational learning; the role of leadership and social exchange in the CE process; and, key research opportunities relevant to CE in an international context. To address the latter issue, we propose a typology that separates content from process-related studies and new ventures vs. established companies. We close with a reassessment of the outcomes in CE research, which becomes particularly salient with the increasing importance of social, human, and intellectual capital in creating competitive advantages and wealth in today’s knowledge economy. Throughout the article, we use the organizational learning theory as a means of integrating our discussion and highlighting the potential contributions of CE to knowledge creation and effective exploitation.

R&D intensive firms have become increasingly important over the past a few decades, at least partly because of the value they create for stakeholders. The research dealing with such firms has begun...

Executive Overview As the 21st century unfolds, entrepreneurial actions are viewed as critical pathways to competitive advantage and improved performance. One company in the healthcare management Held, Acordia, Inc., developed and prospered through its strategic entrepreneurial vision. In the words of Acordia's CEO, Frank C. Witthun: “2000 was another landmark year for Acordia, with important acquisitions, innovative new products, and the foresight of sound, strategic planning fueling our impressive growth. It is our expert vision that has brought us to this point: a vision of what a brokerage firm can and should be in the new millennium, and our expertise in delivering innovative products and services to our clients in a way that not only exceeds their expectations, but fundamentally changes them.” Starting in 1986, entrepreneurial actions were instrumental to how Acordia has conducted business over the last 15 or so years. We use insights from the academic literature and business press as the framework ...

Creating wealth is at the heart of both entrepreneurship and strategic management. For general managers and entrepreneurs, a keen interest is to learn how to apply entrepreneurial and strategic tools, techniques, and concepts in ways that help the firm create increasing amounts of wealth. Many of the activities that organizations engage in to create wealth take place within six domains: innovation, networks, internationalization, organizational learning, top management teams and governance, and growth. Importantly, the entrepreneurship and strategic management literatures have insights for entrepreneurs and general managers about the value to be gained by paying attention to these six domains. We describe how these insights can be classified as entrepreneurial and strategic actions, and discuss how greater wealth can be created when firms integrate these actions when seeking to create wealth.

Entrepreneurship involves identifying and exploiting entrepreneurial opportunities. However, to create the most value entrepreneurial firms also need to act strategically. This calls for an integration of entrepreneurial and strategic thinking. We explore this strategic entrepreneurship in several important organizational domains to include external networks and alliances, resources and organizational learning, innovation and internationalization. The research in this special issue examines both traditional (e.g., contingency theory, strategic fit) and new theory (e.g., cultural entrepreneurship, business model drivers). The research also integrates, extends, and tests theory and research from entrepreneurship and strategic management in new ways such as creative destruction (discontinuities), resource-based view, organizational learning, network theory, transaction costs and institutional theory. The research presented herein provides a basis for future research on strategic entrepreneurship for wealth creation. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

An increasing number of new venture firms are internationalizing their business operations early in their life cycles. Previous explanations of this trend have focused on the importance of technological knowledge, skills, and resources for new ventures' international expansion. However, little is known about how these firms use the technological learning gained through internationalization. This study examined the effects of international expansion, as measured by international diversity and mode of market entry, on a firm's technological learning and the effects of this learning on the firm's financial performance.

Privatization has become a popular strategy to promote economic development in emerging, developing, and developed economies. Despite its popularity, little attention has been devoted to examination of the organizational and managerial implications of privatization or to the effect of privatization on companies' ability to innovate and engage in entrepreneurial activities. In this article the authors discuss privatization's increasing importance and present a model that links privatization to a firm's entrepreneurial activities. The authors conclude with a discussion of issues that they believe deserve scholars' attention in theory development and subsequent empirical examination.

The foci of strategic entrepreneurship (SE) are broad and rich, building on research from multiple disciplines such as economics, psychology, and sociology, along with other subdisciplines in management including organizational behavior and organization theory. Herein, we examine the contributions of strategic management and entrepreneurship to SE. Building on a previous model of SE, we develop an input-process-output model to extend our understanding of the SE construct. We examine the resource inputs into SE, such as individual knowledge and skills. In addition, we explore the resource orchestration processes that are important for SE and the outcomes, including creating value for customers, building wealth for stockholders, and creating benefits for other stakeholders, especially for society at large. Individual entrepreneurs also benefit through financial wealth, but other outcomes such as personal satisfaction and fulfillment of personal needs (e.g., self-actualization) may be of equal or even greater importance. Therefore, we incorporate in the model of SE multilevel outcomes that motivate entrepreneurs.

Ours is a multifaceted academic discipline. Indeed, scholars seeking to publish their management-related research in AMJ have interests in diverse areas of inquiry, such as management history, technology and innovation management, and management spirituality and religion, among a host of others. The Academy of Management’s 24 divisions and interest groups are perhaps a meaningful proxy for the sheer diversity of management scholarship. One might even argue that the eclectic nature of this scholarship contributes to researchers’ ability to consistently produce intriguing and stimulating findings.