Search

While employees predisposed to entrepreneurship are crucial for creating entrepreneurial organizations, we do not know much about how employees develop their entrepreneurial orientation in incumbent organizations. To address this gap, drawing upon human capital theory, we hypothesize that the use of agile practices allows employees to develop digital skills, enabling them to increase their entrepreneurial orientation. We also hypothesize that individual ambidexterity positively moderates the relationship between digital skills and employees' entrepreneurial orientation. We test and find support for our hypotheses on a sample of 299 employees working for a large IT company. Our findings contribute to both research and practice on corporate entrepreneurship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, we investigate the individual origins of ambidexterity by focusing on how entrepreneurs' subjective vitality impacts on the new ventures' simultaneous engagement of both exploration and exploitation, and how this relationship is moderated by the context in which the entrepreneurs are embedded. To do so, we take advantage of a sample of 15,561 student entrepreneurs, defined as university students who run an entrepreneurial activity. Student entrepreneurs represent an appropriate setting for our study since they are socially embedded in two contexts, the family and the university, which offer resources and norms uniquely influencing entrepreneurial behaviors. Data are obtained from the GUESSS ('Global University Entrepreneurial Spirit Students' Survey') project. We find that subjective vitality is positively related to new ventures' ambidexterity and that such effect increases at higher levels of vitality. Moreover, at low levels of vitality, the positive association is amplified for student entrepreneurs whose parents are majority owners of a business; conversely, at high levels of vitality, the vitality-ambidexterity relationship is magnified by a favorable university climate towards entrepreneurship." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Economic growth and innovation in our society are driven by the presence of individuals endowed with entrepreneurial skills who allow them to spur processes of knowledge spillover and commercialization. To equip individuals with entrepreneurial skills and prepare them to engage into entrepreneurial activities, universities offer entrepreneurship education (EE) courses. However, the growing number of EE impact studies offers mixed and apparently contradicting results about the results of such courses. Our study contributes to this literature by conceptualizing the type of EE (elective vs. compulsory) and the students' exposure to family business as institutional and social boundary conditions that explain the heterogeneous outcomes observed by EE impact studies. To do so we take advantage of a quasi-experimental research and on a sample of 446 university students who have participated to two consecutive waves of the Global University Entrepreneurial Spirit Students' Survey (GUESSS). While we find that both types of EE contribute to students' entrepreneurial skills, their impact is contingent to several dimensions students' exposure to family business (i.e., having self-employed parents, students' perceptions of parents' performance as entrepreneurs and working experience in the family firm). Additionally, we find that none of EE type is per se sufficient to induce students to engage in actual entrepreneurial behavior. Taken together, our results add further nuances on the conditions under which institutions create opportunities for individuals to acquire entrepreneurial skills. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]