Corporate entrepreneurship as a survival routine

Abstract

In this chapter, the authors conceptualize corporate entrepreneurship as a mental model that allows firms to adapt to new competitive landscapes by facilitating the development of new cognitive scripts and schemas. The authors begin by explaining what it means for a firm to be competitively bewildered, or lost, in a rapidly changing competitive domain. The authors also describe five stages of being lost competitively. The authors then map the attributes of an entrepreneurial firm – adaptability, speed, flexibility, aggressiveness, and innovativeness – to stages of the bewilderment process wherein they may be most helpful to realign competitive realities and entrepreneurial scripts and schemas. The authors conclude by proposing contributions resulting from conceptualizing corporate entrepreneurship as a bewilderment schema and also explain how this represents a novel perspective.