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Environmental uncertainty, turbulence, and heterogeneity create a host of strategic and operational challenges for today’s organizations (Brown & Eisenhardt, 1998). To cope with the challenge of simultaneously developing and nurturing both today’s and tomorrow’s core competencies, firms increasingly rely on effective use of corporate entrepreneurship (Covin & Miles, 1999). These facts make it imperative that managers at all levels actively participate in designing and implementing a strategy for corporate entrepreneurship actions. The recent literature reveals that there is a general although certainly not a complete consensus around the position that successful corporate entrepreneurship (CE) is linked to improvement in firm performance (Ireland et al., 2001). Covin, Ireland and Kuratko (2003) suggest that corporate entrepreneurship is increasingly recognized as a legitimate path to high levels of organizational performance and that the understanding of corporate entrepreneurship as a valid and effective practice with real, tangible benefits is occurring across firm type and managerial levels. Other researchers cite corporate entrepreneurship’s importance as a growth strategy (Kuratko, 1993; Kuratko et al., 1993; Merrifield, 1993; Pinchott, 1985; Zahra, 1991; Zahra & Covin, 1995; Zahra, Kuratko & Jennings, 1999). As an example, Dess, Lumpkin and McGee (1999) note that, “Virtually all organizations – new start-ups, major corporations, and alliances among global partners – are striving to exploit product-market opportunities through innovative and proactive behavior” – the type of behavior that is called for by corporate entrepreneurship. Barringer and Bluedorn (1999) suggested that in light of the dynamism and complexity of today’s environments, “…entrepreneurial attitudes and behaviors are necessary for firms of all sizes to prosper and flourish.” Developing an internal environment that cultivates employees’ interest in and commitment to creativity and the innovation that can result from it contributes to successful competition in today’s competitive arenas. A valuable and appropriate internal organizational environment is a product of effective work (often within the context of corporate entrepreneurship) by managers at all levels (Floyd & Lane, 2000).

In business environments characterized by intense competition, globalization, rapid technological diffusion, accelerated product life cycles, and evolving industry boundaries, the ability of firms to adapt effectively to their changing environments is a strategic imperative (Hitt, Keats, & DeMarie, 1998; Nadler & Tushman, 1999). The exhibition of strategic adaptability – the ability of a firm to alter its alignment with the environment through reactive and proactive behaviors (Evans, 1991) – is a function of the goodness-of-fit that exists between the capabilities of a firm and the demands imposed by its relevant industry context (Burgelman & Grove, 1996). When firm capabilities are well aligned with industry success factors, those capabilities constitute strategic assets for the firm, or resources that lead to the achievement of competitive success in that context (Amit & Schoemaker, 1993). The possession of strategic assets thus contributes to a state of adaptation, defined by Chakravarthy (1982) as a state in which an organization exhibits the capacity to survive the conditions of its changing environment. Because of the constantly shifting nature of the environment, a state of adaptation is not a permanent settling point for the organization, but rather a moving target for the organization as it attempts to remain “mapped on” to the exigencies of the environment.

In this chapter, the authors describe and explain how executive management enacts strategizing routines to strengthen their entrepreneurial agility, as a precondition to make new strategic moves possible. The authors contribute to the routine dynamics research program, by showing how the dynamics of routines, in a strategy context, shape strategic outcomes: the authors describe four strategizing routines – distancing, evaluating, experimenting, and re-assembling – as a particular promising focus for routine and strategy research. The authors discuss executive management’s enactment of such routines as part of their strategy work. The authors show how routine enactment makes entrepreneurial agility and new strategic moves possible. By exploring the dynamics of strategizing routines and their impact on strategic outcomes, the authors at the same time benefit from and contribute to the strategy-as-practice research program. Empirically, the authors study how the executive management of Hoechst AG successfully made unthinkable new strategic moves possible, discussable, and realizable in the context of the corporation’s strategic transformation between 1994 and 1996.

Entrepreneurial firms are vital to economic growth because they bring creative insights and unique capabilities to the marketplace. The content of entrepreneurial firm strategies reflect the unique opportunities that the technological breakthroughs, operational efficiencies, and/or marketing genius of entrepreneurial firms bring into existence. Entrepreneurial firms are at the forefront of creating new classes of products and services, and sometimes even new industries. With them, they often bring new methods of competing. Volume 11 identifies several strategic dilemmas and strategic choices that organizations face in their efforts to be more entrepreneurial. It concludes with a lively debate between well-known scholars regarding the best ways to advance entrepreneurship as a scholarly field.

Refining and updating Harvey’s theorisation of the shift from managerialism to entrepreneurialism, this chapter charts the changing business of entrepreneurial governance through an examination of English economic development practice. Local Enterprise Partnerships (LEPs), sub-national entrepreneurial governance entities, provide the empirical lens to understand the contemporary role of private interests in the pursuit of public goals in securing innovative approaches to economic development.

Comparative analysis of the strategic priorities, ways of working and interventions of LEPs operating across Greater Birmingham and the North East of England is undertaken against the backdrop of a competitive environment where the mantra is ‘the market knows best’.

The key finding is that while some policy outcomes are prosaic, albeit across contextually distinct entrepreneurial governance places, more innovative policy approaches are emerging.

The chapter shows that there remains value in business involvement in urban governance in its present mode. A more permissive, entrepreneurial mode of governance with the liberation of private enterprise may be leading to imaginative as well as boosterist ways of securing sustainable growth.

The chapter suggests some options for policy-makers and a series of challenges for decision-makers.

Despite the growing importance of young, entrepreneurial ventures in modern economic systems, many such ventures fail quite early in their lifecycles. While both evolutionary theory and organizational learning theory yield important insights for the literature on young venture survival, questions remain as to why ventures facing similar environments experience differential rates of survival. In response, I propose a theory of entrepreneurial agency – defined as the emergence and/or transformation of firms, markets, industries governed by the evolving interaction of temporally situated, intentional strategic action with a malleable external environment – to complement prevailing viewpoints on the causes of young venture survival. My central thesis in this chapter is that to develop more comprehensive explanations of differential survival rates, a theory of entrepreneurial agency – illuminating the transformative potential of entrepreneurial action – is necessary to complement evolutionary perspectives in the literature on firm survival. With this objective in mind, I construct a theoretical model linking diverse perspectives on the duality of human agency and theories of environmental selection, and offer several theoretical and empirical suggestions to guide future research.

The accelerating past globalisation had pressurised various types of enterprises, including state-owned enterprises (SOEs), to adopt appropriate decision-making approaches for their internationalisation strategies. The present book chapter illustrates the role that an entrepreneurial approach played in the decision-making process about the international expansion of an incumbent and large, SOE after its initial internationalisation. The case of a formerly state-owned telecommunication enterprise from Scandinavia will be explored that highlights aspects of entrepreneurial decision-making, internal organisational changes, and the influence of individual managers within the executive management team which influenced the process of internal decision-making. The empirical chapter makes important contributions to notably the practice of entrepreneurial decision-making for internationalisation; it unveils the complexities of internal decision-making processes, including the struggles between individual managers, and thereby provides a better understanding for management practitioners about decision-making for competitiveness and growth during the internationalisation of large, yet inexperienced enterprises.

Building dynamic capabilities that are differentiated from those of the emerging competitors is the major challenge for growing firms. Becoming a great company is a function of management’s ability to integrate entrepreneurship at strategic and operational levels within the organization. Corporate entrepreneurship represents a framework for the facilitation of ongoing change and innovation in established organizations. It provides a blueprint for coping effectively with the new competitive realities that companies encounter in the global marketplace. This paper examines the latest research concerning the triggering of corporate entrepreneurship and the critical link of middle managers to the implementation of the process.

Purpose – By means of this case study, we aim to learn from failure and provide an explanatory approach why the promising prospects in a developing country could not be exploited and strategic actions failed.

Design/methodology/approach – Based on literature within the areas of uncertainty, entrepreneurial activity and political strategy, we provide an event-based case analysis and develop an explanatory model as to why the foreign direct investment (FDI) failed.

Findings – Results provide insights on the effectiveness of political strategies and point to the relevance of entrepreneurial overconfidence as a diminishing cognitive process leading to a misinterpretation of both internal and external conditions.

Originality/value – The exploratory study provides in-depth insights on a failed business and presents an explanatory approach for the business’ collapse.

The literature on international entrepreneurship offers two competing views on why new ventures internationalize: (a) the nature of the opportunity pulls them international or (b) the founder pushes the firm international. While these two internationalization drivers are not independent, they do represent unique causal mechanisms. Previously, the tools available to understand the entrepreneur’s disposition toward internationalization were limited. The present study uses the theoretical foundation of the international entrepreneurial orientation construct and from it develops and tests an attitudinally-based individual-level measure of disposition toward internationalization. To ensure the validity and reliability of the new measure, termed International Entrepreneurial Orientation Disposition, studies were conducted to: develop new scale items, examine their psychometric properties and construct validity, and demonstrate criterion validity. A strong measurement model is developed using structural equation modeling (CFI = 0.93, RMSEA = 0.07), and the measure is shown to be useful as a predictor of perceived international venture attractiveness.