Daniel A. Lerner

Bringing It All Back Home: Corporate Venturing and Renewal through Spin-ins:

More often than not, corporate acquisitions are expensive and difficult, especially those transacted for the purpose of advancing the aims of corporate entrepreneurship (CE). Motivated by frequent, high-cost failures, firms are experimenting with novel organizational structures and fresh approaches to acquisition-driven CE. In this study, we examine the effectiveness of corporate spin-ins—acquisitions in which the acquired company is founded by former employees of the acquiring firm—in resolving key challenges of CE-motivated acquisitions Using a matched pairwise dataset of spin-in and non-spin-in acquisitions, we discover that spin-ins generate superior outcomes, positioning them as a high-potential facet of CE portfolios.

Action! Impulse Driven Logic & Entrepreneurial Opportunity Pursuit

Extant literature typically presumes entrepreneurs to be evaluating opportunities before deciding to pursue them. We explore the limits of this premise by considering less deliberate, more impulse driven logics of action and the context of opportunities in the informal economy. Two studies were conducted exploring whether the less reasoned logic of impulsive sensation seeking positively predicted acting on formal economy opportunities (H1), acting on necessarily informal economy (i.e. underground) opportunities (H2), and was more strongly related to acting on underground opportunities (H3). The results support a sensation-seeking logic of opportunity pursuit without consideration of potential consequences. Our findings provide a basis for future research and advancing theory, offering an alternative to relatively deliberate logics of entrepreneurial action.