Susan A. Hill

Ambidexterity and Survival in Corporate Venture Units

Corporate venture (CV) units constitute vehicles through which firms may act ambidextrously, thereby increasing their longevity, but they suffer from a high failure rate. The authors examine why and how some CV units last significantly longer than others. They argue that CV units endure by developing an ambidextrous orientation themselves—they build new capabilities for the parent firm while simultaneously leveraging its existing strengths. They argue that CV units become ambidextrous by nurturing a supportive relational context, defined by the strength of their relationships with three different sets of actors—parent firm executives, business unit managers, and members of the venture capital community. Using primary data collected from 95 CV units over a three-year period, the authors test and find support for these arguments.

Idea sets: conceptualizing and measuring a new unit of analysis in entrepreneurship research

Idea sets—the complete stock of entrepreneurial ideas an individual has accessible within his or her memory at any given time—are proposed as a new unit of analysis through which the antecedents, processes, and outcomes of entrepreneurial opportunity recognition may be more fully understood. A number of dimensions are identified along which one person’s idea set may be compared with that of another person. These comprise the novelty, volume, content, stage of development, strategic value logic, and composite knowledge configuration of ideas within the idea set. The idea set construct and the methods advocated for its empirical operationalization provide a differentiated, comprehensive approach to investigating entrepreneurial opportunities. They also help to overcome sample selection and survival biases characterizing empirical research in this domain. A questionnaire-based idea set instrument, designed and tested in the corporate context, demonstrates good evidence of content, convergent and divergent validities.

Internal corporate venturing: A review of (almost) five decades of literature

The continued, and burgeoning, growth of interest in corporate entrepreneurship (CE) amongst scholars and managers makes an opportune time for stocktaking and examination of the field’s current state of knowledge, and to reflect on the road ahead. This is especially important given the longstanding but frequently noncumulative, fragmented nature of research into CE (as well as entrepreneurship more broadly). Recent years have thus evidenced a number of reviews of CE literature (Dess et al. 2003; Ireland and Webb 2007; Narayanan et al. 2009). Multiple facets of CE have been examined in such literature reviews, including:

Combining versus transforming knowledge? A comparison of the volume and novelty of new ideas

Integrating traditionally disparate technological search and organisational creativity literatures, we hypothesize divergence in the information processing antecedents of the novelty and volume of individuals’ new ideas in corporations. In so doing, we investigate jointly the infrequently united counterparts in information processing: contextual stimuli and knowledge. Furthermore, we unite widely used but seldom combined dimensions of ideas (and innovations), i.e. novelty and volume. We test our propositions via a unique primary dataset. Questionnaire data was collected from 388 employees of three multinational companies, supplemented by in-depth interviews, and validated against supervisory assessments. The findings are supportive of divergent antecedents for the novelty and volume of an individual’s ideas: an individual’s knowledge profile proved more important to the volume of their ideas, while the stimuli to which they were exposed were more critical to the novelty of their ideas. And, importantly, countering the assumption of technological search theory of a single ‘recombinant search’ process underlying innovation, distinctive knowledge processes appear to differentiate between more and less novel ideation processes.