
Corporate Entrepreneurship
Chapter from the book:
Eryeşil,
K.
&
Aslan,
A.
(eds.)
2025.
Variety and Transformation in Entrepreneurship: Corporate, Social, Cultural, and Technological Perspectives.
Synopsis
Corporate entrepreneurship is a concept related to renewing organizations, markets, or industries through innovation in order to create or maintain a competitive advantage. This concept is considered a critical independent theoretical framework for established companies to maintain their long-term sustainability and ability to adapt to changing environments. At a conceptual level, innovation, risk-taking, and proactivity are generally accepted as the fundamental dimensions of corporate entrepreneurship. The literature shows that these three dimensions play a decisive role in company performance not independently, but together.
Corporate entrepreneurship manifests itself in two main approaches: corporate entrepreneurship and strategic entrepreneurship. Corporate entrepreneurship aims to create new businesses or add new ones to existing ones (through internal, collaborative, or external methods), while strategic entrepreneurship refers to initiatives that do not require adding new business units to the company but involve large-scale innovations in areas such as strategy, product, market, internal organization, or business model.
The corporate entrepreneurship strategy represents a company's systematic and comprehensive efforts towards entrepreneurial activities. At the core of this strategy are three internal elements: an entrepreneurial strategic vision, an organizational structure that supports entrepreneurship, and entrepreneurial processes and behaviors demonstrated throughout the organization. This strategy aims to achieve a sustainable competitive advantage by continuously renewing the organization and evaluating entrepreneurial opportunities. Effective implementation increases operational efficiency and encourages the sharing of organizational knowledge, but it can also have some disadvantages, such as profit-orientedness and uncertain technology investments. The success of the strategy depends on the alignment between the vision of organizational leaders and the actions of individual employees, as well as the commitment of all individuals.