How Bricolage Drives Corporate Entrepreneurship: The Roles of Opportunity Identification and Learning Orientation

Abstract

While most studies have viewed bricolage as a tool to overcome resource constraints in the context of new ventures, few of them have directly investigated the effects of bricolage to identify new entrepreneurial opportunities in the context of incumbent firms. Drawing upon a subjectivist view of entrepreneurship, we reframe bricolage as a concrete activity of experiential resource‐learning that creates subjective knowledge of resource at hand. We argue that the subjective knowledge derived from bricolage will shape a firm's “subjective opportunity set” and facilitate opportunities identification, which will ultimately increase the likelihood of the incumbent firm's corporate entrepreneurship (including product innovation, venturing, and strategic renewal). Hypotheses are thus developed to examine the relationship between bricolage and corporate entrepreneurship as well as the mediating role of opportunity identification. Moreover, as bricolage activities depend on interactive social contexts rather than individual efforts, the firm's learning orientation is proposed as a moderator that influences the positive effects of bricolage on opportunity identification. We test these hypotheses using the survey data from 248 incumbent firms in China. The empirical results generally support our hypotheses by showing that (1) bricolage positively influences opportunity identification, (2) opportunity identification mediates the relationship between bricolage and corporate entrepreneurship, and (3) learning orientation has a positive moderating effect on the relationship between bricolage and opportunity identification. These findings contribute to our understanding of the role of bricolage in context of corporate entrepreneurship by being an opportunity identification incubator. Implications for managers are also included in the end of this article.