Assessing motives for Corporate Entrepreneurship : Case study on established Nordic companies

Abstract: Due to constant disruption, companies need to embed innovation into their everyday activities in order to cope with competition and be successful. Corporate Entrepreneurship is playing an important role in fostering innovation and is needed to avoid disruption. However, companies have also different motives when handling CE as well as various ways of implementing it in the organization. This study investigated the motives of CE among large companies and the various implementation efforts. Therefore, the research question is: Which are the motives for CE? and the sub-question is: How does that lead to variation in CE implementation? The focus of the study was large companies which headquarter in Nordic countries and belong in different industries. Therefore, nine semi-structured interviews were performed and after, the data from the interviews were analyzed with thematic analysis. The results showed that the companies have different reasonings about their CE efforts and the CE implementation varied depending on the companies’ motives. However, these factors may not affect directly the organizational maturity. Therefore, companies can have their motives and support their CE efforts in different ways without influence negatively the maturity of the organization.