Corporate Entrepreneurship : State-of-The-Art Research and a Future Research Agenda

Managers and management scholars have traditionally embraced the premise that sustainable competitive advantage must be developed by firms to achieve and perpetuate competitive superiority. The validity of the notion that competitive advantages are sustainable began to be questioned toward the end of the 20th century as the dual forces of technological change and globalization heightened com- petition and eroded bases — sometimes long-established bases — for competitive superiority (Bettis and Hitt, 1995). Innovation began to be regarded as inherent to effective management practice, and the premise that competitive advantage must be renewed replaced the premise that competitive advantage is sustainable. The recognized need for renewal led managers and management scholars to consider how entrepreneurial processes might be enacted within established organizations for the purposes of achieving and perpetuating competitive superiority (Covin and Slevin, 2002). Thus, an interest in corporate entrepreneurship (CE) was born. CE seeks to renew established organizations, thereby facilitating their viability and competitiveness through the utilization of various innovation-based initiatives