Corporate Accelerators: A Grounded Study of Motives, Manifestations and Measures

Abstract

Entrepreneurship is an act of creation. In business entrepreneurship it manifests most often as a new venture. Entrepreneurial ventures strive to grow and become large organizations. But upon reaching maturity, many of these large organizations struggle to retain their entrepreneurial orientation or “entrepreneurialness”. Their very existence is threatened due to the increasing environmental unpredictability and accelerated technology development. To combat these challenges many large organizations started internal research and development divisions. While these research and development divisions created inventions, commercializing them into innovations remained a challenge. Encouraging entrepreneurial behavior among employees (popularly called intrapreneurship) was identified as a solution. This resulted in the creation of internal corporate ventures. But with the surge in disruptive technologies and lowering costs of creating innovative new ventures, organizations soon realized that engaging in only internal venturing efforts was not sufficient to stay in the game. Large corporations began going outside their traditional organizational boundaries to source innovations, technologies as well as new ventures. This is called external corporate venturing. Corporate entrepreneurship refers to the domain within the field of entrepreneurship that studies how entrepreneurial action is enacted by firms and their employees.