Engines of progress: Designing and running entrepreneurial vehicles in established companies☆

Despite extensive research on the impact of ambidexterity strategy on firm performance, little is known about how team and individual factors affect innovation performance in new-venture businesses. In response to the call for research on the topic, this study examines the relationship between ambidexterity—which includes exploitative and exploratory strategies—and innovation performance. The study finds that the relationship is mediated by founding-team marketing capabilities and moderated by managerial autonomy. This model is empirically tested using 165 new ventures in the UAE. The findings suggest that an exploratory strategy improves the founding team's marketing capabilities, whereas an exploitative strategy worsens these capabilities. Exploitative strategy and the founding team's marketing abilities are negatively affected by managerial autonomy. However, managerial autonomy has no significant impact on either exploratory strategy or the founding team's marketing capabilities. The findings also show that the founding team's marketing skills mediate the relationship between exploratory strategy—but not exploitative strategy—and innovation performance.

This study provides a fine-grained analysis of the decision-making process and criteria underling the evaluation and selection of nascent corporate ventures. By integrating a small sample case-based analysis and the examination of a longitudinal dataset comprising 14 years of archival data, it explores the selection and funding process of early-stage entrepreneurial initiatives supported by the internal corporate venture unit of a major energy company. Its findings extend prior conceptualizations of the internal venture selection process, uncovering differences in the relevance of the criteria used to evaluate ventures at different stages.

This paper has been designed to analyse the impact of the structure of social networks on academic spin-offs’ entrepreneurial orientation. We have specifically focus on both size and frequency of three different types of social networks: informal networks (composed of family and friends); market networks (composed of agents belonging to the business context); and university support networks (composed of university institutions and agents). With the premises of Resource Dependence Theory as theoretical background and drawing on a sample of 167 Spanish academic spinoffs, results of regression analysis have highlighted the positive influence of market networks and university support networks on the enhancement of academic spin-offs’ entrepreneurial orientation, as well as the null impact exerted by informal networks. Our paper expands the research developed in the fields of academic entrepreneurship, social networks and Resource Dependence Theory and offers some suggestions to academic spin-offs’ managers and university support institutions.

Corporate venture investments are an established means for incumbent firms to access radical innovation. Drawing from a behavioural agency framework, we distinguish two mechanisms that govern the relationship between corporate venture investment and radical innovation, the safety net that corporate sponsors provide and control incentives. While the safety net induces a gap between the radical innovation success of corporate ventures (CVs) and ventures without a corporate sponsor, the superior radical innovation success of CVs decreases with the corporate sponsor’s incentives to control the venture. The impact of the safety net and control incentives further depends on the corporate sponsor’s position vis-à-vis her aspiration level.