Corporate Entrepreneurship (CE) has become an established tool to create discontinuous innovations for many established companies. Thus, they have started to implement multiple CE units in parallel. However, despite different positive effects potentially arising from the parallel use and purposeful coordination of CE units, managers and scholars alike have so far widely ignored such holistic perspectives. This study therefore wants to shed light on the effects the parallel use and coordination have on established companies' innovation performance. Following an explorative approach, it investigates quantitatively the relationships between the number of CE units as well as their heterogeneity (in terms of their forms) used by a company and companies' innovativeness. Further, it employs qualitative interview data to gain deeper insights into the effects. Interestingly, the results show that the mere number of CE units does not have a significant effect on the innovativeness, but that more heterogeneous sets of CE units do. This provides an argument for the strategic coordination and co-specialization of CE units in order to make use of positive effects associated with multiple CE units. The study thereby contributes both to Asset Orchestration theory and the CE literature and provides multiple managerial implications as well as different avenues for future research.

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While Corporate Entrepreneurship (CE) units have become essential tools for creating new kinds of innovation within established companies, their performance measurement remains underexplored. With CE units, companies intend to contribute to new business and organizational transformation. Thereby, CE units are used to create outputs that are new for the core organization. Until now, scholars have neglected to investigate assessing CE unit performance, leading to a lack of understanding of appropriate metrics for CE units. Companies often use traditional metrics designed for relatively static contexts, but these metrics do not fit for CE units. This study explores the metrics used in CE units, analyzing 12 interviews with 11 German companies. The analysis reveals a list of different metrics, categories, and underlying dimensions for CE unit performance measurement. Finally, we suggest scientific and managerial implications and topics for future research.

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Corporate Entrepreneurship (CE) units have become an increasingly important part of established companies' development activities enabling them to also create more discontinuous innovations. As a result, companies have developed and implemented different forms of CE units, such as corporate accelerators, incubators, startup supplier programs, and corporate venture capital. Driven by the need to innovate, companies have even begun to use multiple CE units simultaneously. However, this has not been empirically investigated yet. Thus, with this study, we aim to shed some light on this by investigating the parallel use of multiple CE units in the German business landscape. We conducted an extensive desk research, combining, coding, and analyzing different sources. We found that 55 out of 165 large established companies have multiple CE units, which allowed us to characterize the parallel use and identify differences and similarities, e.g., in terms of industry, company size, and CE forms implemented. We conclude by presenting different implications for both practice and research and by pointing out directions for future research.

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Nowadays established companies use Corporate Entrepreneurship (CE) as a means to create discontinuous innovations. Many companies thereby even implement multiple CE units that typically involve several entrepreneurial activities. This explorative study aimed to identify the reasons why established companies implement multiple CE units concurrently. In conducting a comparative case study with eight companies from different industries, valuable insights for science and practice were gained. We provide an overview of different 11 reasons for implementing multiple CE units. This shows that the combination of CE units used by companies differs depending on the reason. It further allowed to derive general approaches of established companies to the implementation of CE units. Last, we identify the concept of co-specialization to be a central driver explaining the creation of the need to set up multiple units. We conclude by indicating implications and subjects for future research.@en