Keywords: Howard Stevenson; Carlos Jarillo; Entrepreneurial Management; corporate entrepreneurship
A Paradigm of Entrepreneurship: Entrepreneurial Management
By HOWARD H. STEVENSON
Harvard Business School, Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.A.
J. CARLOS JARILLO
IMD, Lausanne, Switzerland
Corporate entrepreneurship seems to many entrepreneurship scholars a contradiction in terms. This paper represents an attempt to bridge that gap. This is done by, first, reviewing the literature on entrepreneurship, trying to summarize it in a few major themes. Second, a view of entrepreneurship is proposed that facilitates the application of the previolus findings to the field of corporate entrepreneulrship. Finally, a series of propositions are developed, as instances of the kind of research that can be pursued by following the proposed approach. Corporate entrepreneurship is a concept that has acquired more and more importance in the last few years. Serious, scholarly work has appeared on the subject (see, for instance, Burgelman, 1983a,b, 1984a,b, Nielsen, Peters and Hisrich, 1985; MacMillan, Block and Subba Narasimha,
1986; Hisrich and Peters, 1986; MacMillan and Day, 1987; for some recent examples). Generalinterest books have also made an impact (Brandt, 1986; Hisrich, 1986; Kanter, 1983, 1989), and some of them have even reached best-seller lists (Pinchot, 1985). The very existence of this issue of the Strategic Management Journal testifies to the credibility gained by the concept among experts in business management.
Yet, when reading much of the literature on entrepreneurship as such, to which corporate entrepreneurship should be somewhat related (perhaps as is a species to its genus), one finds an implicit definition of entrepreneurship as something which is radically different from corporate management. Indeed, some writers find it to be the opposite of corporate management (Vesper, 1985). Thus, the very concept of corporate entrepreneurship sounds to many entrepreneurship scholars as something of an oxymoron.
What is, then, behind that surge of the corporate entrepreneurship construct? There is no doubt that, of late, entrepreneurship in general has gained its status as a legitimate scholarly research subject, enjoying in addition much public interest (Vesper, 1988). This is evidenced by the appearance of new academic journals, such as the Journal of Business Venturing; by the fact that mainstream journals carry more and more articles on related issues (Churchill and Lewis, 1985); and by the growth of interest in non-academic publications, which has been even faster (see McClung, J. J. and J. A. Constantin, 'Nonacademic literature on entrepreneurship: An evaluation', in Kent et al., 1982). As of today, there is practically no business school without at least one course on entrepreneurship (Porter and McKibben, 1988).
THREE MAIN STREAMS OF RESEARCH
The plethora of studies on entrepreneurship can be divided in three main categories: what happens when entrepreneurs act: why they act; and how they act. In the first, the researcher is concerned with the results of the actions of the entrepreneur, not the entrepreneur or even his or her actions per se. It is generally the point of view taken by economists, such as Schumpeter, Kirzner, or Casson. The second current may be termed the psychological/sociological approach', founded by McClelland (1961) and Collins and Moore (1964), in the early 1960s. Their work provides a useful emphasis on the entrepreneur as an individual, and on the idea that individual human beingswith their background, environment, goals, values, and motivations-are the real objects of analysis. The causes of individual entrepreneurial action constitute the primary interest of the researcher. Both the individual entrepreneur and the environment as it relates to the motives of individual entrepreneurial behavior are considered. It is the why of the entrepreneur's actions that becomes the center of attention. Finally, how entrepreneurs act can ... Read more ...
