Corporate envy and emotional dynamics in the internal selection process of corporate venturing initiatives

Corporate venturing initiatives, which exemplify corporate entrepreneurial behavior, follow an evolutionary path of variation, selection, and retention. While their external selection is a consequence of their performance, their internal selection is subject to forces of complementarity and legitimacy, and how well competition from other initiatives is overcome. This chapter aims to unfold the dynamics of the internal selection process of initiatives, focusing on its emotional dimensions. Assuming that organizational agents have a deliberate role in guiding the internal selection process of initiatives, the chapter examines how organizational agents' emotional dynamics influence this process. The chapter draws its theoretical basis from the intraorganizational evolutionary perspective and the literature on emotions in organizations. The case of a corporate venturing initiative and the narratives of four managers involved directly and indirectly in the initiative are used to illustrate how the emotional dynamics of organizational members evoked envy toward a venturing initiative and directly impacted its degree of competition and complementarity with other interacting initiatives, ultimately hampering its selection

Implementation intentions in the entrepreneurial process: concept, empirical findings, and research agenda

Prior studies find sizable gaps between entrepreneurial intentions and subsequent actions. We extend models of entrepreneurial intentions by drawing on action phase theory to better understand how entrepreneurial intentions translate into actions. Our study focuses on the effects of implementation intentions on taking entrepreneurial action. The analysis uses two waves of survey data on 422 individuals, from the Swedish general population, who had an explicit interest in starting a business and who reported on their actions 6 months later. We test and find support for a moderated mediation model in which implementation intentions mediate the effects of goal intentions on taking entrepreneurial action. We further find the mediated effect to be even stronger for those confirming a strong intention to start a new business. We provide an in-depth discussion of the concept of implementation intention and an extensive research agenda.Peer reviewe

The imprinting process of corporate venturing units

Building on the imprinting hypothesis, the paper unfolds the founding process of corporate venturing units in order to explain the apparent multitude of different exemplars of venturing activities. Corporate venturing units are approached as organizational forms of corporate entrepreneurial behavior, socially constructed by entrepreneurial agents. The role of corporate entrepreneurs in cognitively constructing and configuring specific elements that remain as fundamental features of these units is proposed. The instrumental cases of the foundation of two venturing units by their parent corporations are employed to illustrate how founding elements constructed as an outcome of the corporate entrepreneurs’ sensemaking and sensegiving process imprint the postfounding behavior of the venturing units

Corporate entrepreneurial identity and practices construction

While existing literature assumes that organizational members can be corporate entrepreneurs and champion entrepreneurship initiatives, little is known of how they become corporate entrepreneurs and how entrepreneurial behavior practices develop within an organization. The paper draws from the identity work practices literature to argue for the mediating role the construction of an entrepreneurial identity by organizational members has in the development of entrepreneurial practices within an organization, in the absence of prior entrepreneurial experience by the organization. Two instrumental cases, exploring the identity work practices the champions of two corporate venturing programs employed to reconstruct their identity and to project elements of entrepreneurial behavior, are presented. We aim to illustrate how these identity work practices resulted in the creation of a new community of practice within the parent corporation, which other organizational members recognized as entrepreneurial

Constructing corporate entrepreneurial identity and practices in parallel

A speech focusing on the construction of corporate entrepreneurial identity and practices in parallel

The emotional embeddedness of corporate entrepreneurship : the case of envy

This paper argues for the emotional embeddedness of the entrepreneurial act as a moderator of its social embeddedness. Building on the theoretical grounds of the sociology of emotions, we propose the study of entrepreneurial affect as an element of the social-emotional interaction between the entrepreneur and others influenced by the entrepreneurial process. The empirical context of corporate entrepreneurship is used to illustrate how the emotion cycle around the entrepreneurial act, involving the emotions of corporate entrepreneurs and others, indicates the emotional embeddedness of the latter. The emergence of envy towards members of two venturing programs is used to exemplify low levels of emotional and consequently social embeddedness

The corporate venturing process of large corporations : a critical realist perspective

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The emergence of collective corporate entrepreneurial identity : an identity work and practice perspective

We report on the findings of two inductive, interpretive case studies of collective corporate entrepreneurial identity emergence, resulting from the establishment of corporate venturing units in two established corporations. We examined middle managers’ identity work and the collective enactment of communities of entrepreneurial practices as the mechanism to transcend effects of individual identity work to the group and organizational level. The emergent model of collective corporate entrepreneurial identity revolves around the fragmentation and exemplification processes by which the corporate entrepreneur role identity prototype is constructed at the individual level, and around the reconstruction and legitimization processes through which other organizational members embrace the emerging collective corporate entrepreneurial identity at the meso and organizational level of analysis. The moderating role of organizational pressures and individuals’ distinctiveness drive is also highlighted

The interplay between entrepreneurial and organizational identities in the configuration of corporate entrepreneurial practice

While we assume in the corporate entrepreneurship literature that organizational members develop entrepreneurial behavior, little is known of how these members construct an entrepreneurial identity and how this affects the organization. We draw from the social constructionist approach to identity and specifically the identity work literature to explore how the interplay between entrepreneurial and organization identities influence individuals and the organization. We empirically investigate our theorization through the identity work of the champions of two corporate venturing programs that led to the configuration and legitimization of entrepreneurial practices within their parent corporations. Our findings reveal a multilevel entrepreneurial identity work process carried out by organizational members, which through interplays with the dominant organizational identity gives rise to entrepreneurship practices within an organization