Uncovering goals for corporate entrepreneurship

Abstract

Corporate Entrepreneurship (CE) has now evolved into an imperative innovation practice of established companies. Despite organizational design models for CE activities and companies' frequent initiation of new activities, effectively managing them remains a challenging endeavor which results in disappointment about the outcomes of CE and its early termination. We assume specific types of goals for CE as one element of this unresolved management issue. While both practice and literature address goals in different contexts, no uniform picture has emerged so far. Although goals are commonly used to categorize CE activities, they seldomly seem to be the core subject of investigation. Based on this preliminary analysis and consolidation, we put the goals of CE in focus. In a systematic literature review, we reveal aspects of goals to unmask the different types of goals and their underlying dimensions and characteristics. Our review contributes to a better understanding of goals by (1) organizing relevant literature on goals of CE in a specific classification process, (2) describing dimensions and attributes for a systematic classification of CE goals; and (3) providing a framework showing differences of goals for the CE context. We conclude with a discussion and hints for future research paths.