The Individual Agency of Corporate Entrepreneurship

Abstract

Corporate entrepreneurship (CE) is often understood to be a firm-based process, with little (or no) acknowledgment of the individual agency of the employee-entrepreneur. Understanding individual agency, however, is crucial to properly implementing a successful corporate entrepreneurship strategy, because individuals may opt to become independent entrepreneurs rather than corporate entrepreneurs. We help solve this puzzle by expanding the integrative model of corporate entrepreneurship, as suggested by Ireland (Ireland et. al. 2009). We use game theory to analyze the employee-entrepreneur trade-offs involved in the CE process and to model theoretical propositions. The game theory model allows us to evaluate the different paths and provide a formal way of analyzing the cooperative or competitive interactions between the firm and individuals. Our study contributes to the development of formal hypotheses that are supported by game-theory propositions, where equilibrium is reached when, due to asymmetric information, the employee engages in independent entrepreneurship and the firm interacts afterwards by way of marketing.