Corporate Entrepreneurship and Strategic Management: A Review and Conceptual Integration

Firms need both diversity and order in strategy for their continued survival. Corporate entrepreneurship is the process through which organizations turn diversity, autonomously generated by their entrepreneurial operational level participants, into extended order. Middle management plays a key role in this process of experimentation-and-selection. Corporate entrepreneurship cannot be subsumed under strategic planning approaches, and top management’s strategic vision corresponds to the results of corporate entrepreneurship only ex post. The theory and practice of strategic management should incorporate knowledge and skills to exploit and maintain a process of experimentation-and-selection in the organization.