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Executive Interviews: Interview with Robert A Burgelman on Corporate Entrepreneurship
April 2007
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By Dr. Nagendra V Chowdary
Robert A Burgelman Edmund W Littlefield Professor of Management Director of the Stanford Executive Program of the Stanford University Graduate School of Business. 
We keep noticing almost all of the
articles (referred) on corporate
entrepreneurship citing your work as
an invariable reference.
Congratulations on such an
influential work. Can you please share
with us unique building blocks of
your cutting-edge research?
The key building blocks of my model
that integrates corporate
entrepreneurship with strategic
management are based on the
distinction between an induced strategy
process and an autonomous strategy
process. Through the induced strategy
process, a company attempts to exploit
the opportunities associated with its
existing corporate strategy in its familiar
environment.The autonomous process
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serves to explore new opportunities,
usually in new environmental
segments. A key challenge for top
management is to decide which
autonomous opportunities to continue
to pursue with the full support of the
corporation, which means embracing
these opportunities as part of the
corporate strategy going forward, and
which ones to stop. The process
through which such amendments of
the corporate strategy can be made
have called it the strategic context
determination process is the least well
understood part of the corporate
entrepreneurship process. Even today,
25 years later, I think it is still not fully
understood by most corporations. That
is one of the reasons why many
companies go through predictable
cycles of corporate support for
corporate entrepreneurship.
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It's certain that you are one of the
very few pioneers of research in this
field. What had been the trigger for
embarking upon such a "futuristic"research?
I stumbled onto the phenomenon of
autonomous strategic behavior when I
was a doctoral student studying
innovation in a large, complex
technology-based company one of
the giants of old. To my surprise, the
company had created a new venture
division not, in first instance, to
implement a diversification strategy
as I thought would be the case based
on my reading of Chandler's Strategy
and Structure (1962), but because it
already had a multitude of new
ventures that had been scattered
throughout the various major
divisions and the time seemed ripe for
pursuing them in a more deliberate
fashion. This led me to go back and
more carefully re-read Chandler's
magisterial Strategy and Structure.
Again to my surprise, I found that
Chandler actually also documented
autonomous strategic action,
especially in the DuPont case. These
and other findings did indeed inform
my view on the role of autonomous
variation in social systems, which
offered links to theory about selforganization
and complex adaptive
systems, and to evolutionary
organization theory, which was then
emerging as a new perspective in
organizational sociology. -
What prompted you to conceptualize
an elaborate research? Were there any
specific antecedents that might have
had a significant bearing on your
research?
The way I ended up conceptualizing
the process of internal corporate
venturing built on a field study of the
process of resource allocation (related
to strategic capital investment
decisions) in diversified companies
carried out in the late 1960s by Prof.
Joseph Bower of Harvard Business
School. In trying to fit my data into his
process model, I had to extend the
model to encompass the process of
strategic context determination
mentioned earlier. The strategic
context determination process needed
to be added to the resource allocation
process model because in contrast to
the strategic capital investment
decisions studied by Bower, which
basically needed to fit within the
existing corporate strategy, my study of
internal corporate venturing involved
strategic business activities that did not
fit within the existing corporate
strategy; in fact, they required an
amendment of the corporate strategy.
The newly added strategic context
determination process conceptualized
the interlocking simultaneous and
sequential— leadership activities of
different levels of management that,
together, make such an amendment
possible. -
Corporate entrepreneurship, at best
at the moment, is a high sounding
word for the most. Or is it that it's just
a new-found-jargon on the block?
What's corporate entrepreneurship all
about? What are its unique features?
Large corporations are complex
adaptive systems that need both to
maintain "fit"with their existing
environment at any given time, as well
as "evolvability"; i.e., the ability to seek
out new environments with new
growth opportunities over time. Main
taining "fit"depends on the induced
strategy process, which serves to
exploit opportunities associated with
the current corporate strategy in
relation to the environment at any
given time. Maintaining "evolvability"depends critically on the autonomous
strategy process through which
corporate entrepreneurship operates.
Hence, corporate entrepreneurship is
not just a faddish and vacuous concept;
it is a vital function of complex
adaptive systems.
1.
Leadership and Entrepreneurship Case Studies
2. ICMR
Case Collection
3.
Case Study Volumes
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