Corporate Entrepreneurship

Corporate entrepreneurship is the trigger of new business creation in on-going organizations through various innovative endeavors. These entrepreneurial efforts are not limited to different forms of innovations such as product, process, marketing technique, and organization. They also help create new businesses with their combinations and new business models. In addition to innovation, corporate entrepreneurship covers strategic renewal or corporatelevel strategies, such as finding out new businesses or joint venturing with other organizations, merging with another organization, or acquiring a new company.

As to the stakeholder theory (Clarkson, 1995, p.101), the employees with innovation ideas convert themselves from regular employees to definitive stakeholders (Goldsby et al., 2018, p.5). In this sense, the employees who are willing to and are able to transform their ideas to a successful innovation for the sake of their organizations are called internal corporate entrepreneurs (Pinchot, 1985,p.41).

In the study of Antoncic and Hisrich (2003, p.531) and based on the study of Knight (1997, p.219), intrapreneurship has a broader scope and the concept needs a clarification. Intrapreneurship is a process with multi dimensions, which are new business venturing, product/service innovation, process innovation, self-renewal, risk taking, and competitive aggressiveness.

Although the research and literature on entrepreneurial orientation are still in growth, if we aim at summing up the dimensions entrepreneurial orientation, four-dimensional theoretical structure, which are innovativeness, proactiveness, risk-taking propensity, and competitive aggressiveness, becomes prominent among other combinations (Bulut, 2007, p.76).

previous literature categorizes the corporate entrepreneurship in four forms, which are sustained regeneration, organizational rejuvenation, strategic renewal, and domain redefinition (Covin and Miles, 1999, p.48; Dess et al., 2003, p.356).

Although customers do not seize the innovations within the processes, in the internal side of the corporations, sustained regeneration brings value to the corporations in terms of cost reduction or decreasing the delivery of time of the goods or services.

Strategic renewal is another form of corporate entrepreneurship that contributes to the competitive position of corporations by renewing the strategies to cope with and adapt to disruptive changes in the markets.

The final form of corporate entrepreneurship is similar to the proactiveness dimension of entrepreneurial orientation, namely domain redefinition. Domain redefinition is not repositioning the corporations’ competitive position, but it is the positioning or repositioning of one or a group of current or new products or services in the markets. The aim is to benefit from the first-mover advantage, such as the Selpak of Eczacibasi in Turkey. Among all other products of Eczacibasi, Selpak became the generic name of the whole paper napkins in the Turkish napkin market.

Apart from the family or friendship ties, successful leaders create emotional relations with the members and stakeholders of organizations. In turn, the employees’ positive feelings towards their leaders and their vision motivate employees to engage in the given tasks, to work harder, and to show extra-role behaviors.

Research also points to the importance of the middle level managers on intrapreneurship regarding their roles in organizational communication at vertical and horizontal channels (Tutuncuoglu, 2008, p.116). They either accelerate the communication speed or cut the communication between top management and potential intrapreneurs. Therefore, middle managers have vital roles as they can facilitate the intrapreneurship or they may create big blocks in front of intrapreneurship that an employee cannot jump over (Hornsby et al., 2002, p.257).

Therefore, the support of management takes place in two integrated processes. The initial is creating the means for idea generation, idea development and collecting them. The latter is for the evaluation of those ideas in committees and includes transforming the novel ideas into written projects to reduce the risks and letting intrapreneurs to actualize their innovative ideas.

Two types of rewards based on the perception of employees are proposed in the literature. One type is the extrinsic rewards that are perceived as a significant economic or financial value. Intrinsic rewards refer to the psychological rewards perceived values of which are much higher than their economic value or exchange value with money. The main sorts of intrinsic rewards are appreciation, gratification, or recognition.

One fundamental common characteristic of entrepreneurs is being independent in their own decisions (Bulut et al., 2013, p.439). Although intrapreneur is a type of entrepreneur who works in organizations, and while their dependency is on their daily routine tasks, they need autonomy to successfully generate ideas and pioneer innovations for the best of their firms (Kemelgor, 2002, p.72).

According to the resource-based theory of firms, if a firm’s resources are rare, valuable, and hard to imitate by its competitors, it brings a distinct competitive advantage to that firm. Therefore, besides owning human capital and other intellectual resources, firms’ inputs and production processes are also one of the main predictors of the production.

When top managers act traditionally, in other words when they just try to fulfil the demands of the customers and float with the volatility of the current markets, because of the fuzziness in the plans and strategies, they naturally skip the controlling function of management. Under these circumstances, the focus of performance assessment shifts from controlling the objectives to judging the personality or characters of employees or professional managers.

In the strategic control processes of corporate entrepreneurship, while modern managers will show interest in how to learn from failures and produce alternative business models; in failures, traditional management tends to correct the employees who fail. Although corporate entrepreneurship exists both in traditional and modern organizations (Zahra, 2005, p.38), while modern management focuses on processes and business modelling, traditional management focuses on costs made and their perceptions towards the attitudes of intrapreneurs as change-agents.

According to the definition before the 2018 update in Oslo Manual (OECD/Eurostat, 2018, p.68), since innovation is the ultimate outcome in forms of product/service, process, marketing method, or organization, the definition was not very clear. In Oslo Manual 2018, the definitions are precise. While the efforts for innovation until it reaches commercial success refers to innovation activities, innovation is defined as the outcome.

For measuring the outcomes of corporate entrepreneurship in process innovation, managers can control the intrapreneurship effectiveness with salient indicators that are strongly related to process-based endeavours such as the effects of intrapreneurial efforts on the quality improvements, the cost reduction, or shortening the time of delivering the products to the customers

utilizing advance performance indicators at the strategy formulation processes for establishing the effective corporate entrepreneurship environment will support the rate of successful innovations not just for corporations, but also for national development.

In many instances, employees blend their thoughts and emotions with the work and tasks that they conduct, with the attitudes of their superiors towards themselves. Moreover, they also develop positive or negative feelings for their organizations, based on their experiences.