Corporate entrepreneurship in SMEs, an evaluation of venture level success factors

Abstract

This article refines the knowledge about what causes corporate ventures to succeed or fail. The research model includes 13 different success factors from previous research and assesses their individual and collective impact on venture outcome. By encompassing most of the prevalent factors in relevant literature the risk of getting misleading influence coefficients, due to omitted independent variables, is mitigated. Structural equation modelling with survey data from 274 ventures gave results that imply that several of the proposed success factors actually have no effect on venture outcome. On the other hand, there are also some factors that have a significant impact on success, in particular market uncertainty, previous venture experience, resource availability, style of management, and opportunity size. The internal order of importance among the factors, however, depends on which measure of venture outcome that is used.