A system dynamics perspective of corporate entrepreneurship

Abstract

Models of corporate entrepreneurship have continued to advance in their ability to delineate the elements and relationships that comprise entrepreneurial activities within existing organizations; however, prior research has been limited in introducing the complexity present in these activities. In particular, feedback from discontinued and implemented opportunities has rarely been included and/or integrated with individual, organizational, and strategic variables in existing corporate entrepreneurship frameworks. We propose a system dynamics perspective to explain how entrepreneurship occurs within organizations. To accomplish this, we employ a framework that includes the four main activities of opportunity recognition, assessment, legitimation, and implementation. Feedback loops are used to show the connection to strategic assessment and entrepreneurial renewal that portray corporate entrepreneurship as an integration of entrepreneurial and strategic efforts. This model integrates a variety of perspectives that have been utilized in the literature and allows for activation at any point in the system dynamics process. In this paper, we provide theoretical background for our model, discuss our contributions to the literature, and suggest how scholars may implement and enhance this framework in future research efforts.