Long-term success of corporations

In an era defined by technological disruption and heightening competitive intensity, the ability of established firms to identify and exploit entrepreneurial opportunities is essential for long-term success. While corporate entrepreneurship (CE) is recognized as a critical mechanism for firm adaptation and sustainable competitive advantage, Ultimately, this research provides a comprehensive framework for understanding how large firms can coherently configure their entrepreneurial activities to achieve firm-level transformation and sustained competitive advantage. This aggregated perspective fails to account for the conceptual and empirical distinctiveness of its constituent dimensions—innovation, corporate venturing, and strategic renewal—thereby obscuring the divergent organizational attributes, mechanisms, and outcomes associated with each. This dissertation addresses these shortcomings by advancing a more nuanced, multi-dimensional understanding of how entrepreneurial activities are enacted and managed within large, complex organizations. To achieve this, the dissertation comprises three empirical studies that investigate the antecedents, contingencies, and outcomes of CE across diverse organizational settings. The first study addresses a persistent theoretical and empirical blind spot by clarifying the conceptual boundaries of strategic renewal, defining it as a latent construct consisting of mission reformulation, reorganization, system-wide change, and values and norms. By examining its impact on firm innovativeness, specifically exploration and exploitation, the findings demonstrate that strategic renewal enhances exploration particularly under conditions of high local responsiveness. Building on this dimensional focus, the second study adopts a behavioral strategy perspective to investigate how firms translate CE activities into firm performance. It reveals that portfolio selection heuristics—specifically strategic fit, portfolio balance, and maximal value—serve as deliberate rules of thumb to navigate the complexity of managing diverse CE portfolios, with strategic fit and maximal value significantly strengthening the CE-performance relationship. The third study complements this inquiry by examining organizational design antecedents, specifically focusing on how the centralization of decision-making authority influences individual CE dimensions differently. The results reconcile prior inconsistent evidence by showing that while centralization facilitates strategic renewal, it constrains innovation and venturing; these negative effects for innovation are buffered by long-term-oriented strategic ownership. Collectively, these findings underscore that CE dimensions are governed by differentiated organizational principles and embedded within distinct managerial logics. By shifting from an aggregate to a disaggregated lens, this dissertation demonstrates that the effects of organizational design and decision-making are dimension-specific and contingent on the broader organizational context. Ultimately, this research provides a comprehensive framework for understanding how large firms can coherently configure their entrepreneurial activities to achieve firm-level transformation and sustained competitive advantage.

dissertation

true