Corporate entrepreneurship: An institutional-based perspective

Corporate entrepreneurship (CE), a joint function of risk-taking, proactive strategic decision making,
and firm innovation, can potentially provide firms with a competitive advantage. Moreover, it is
important for entire economies as well because it can increase productivity, improve best practices,
create new industries, and enhance international competitiveness. Unsurprisingly, CE has inspired
significant empirical research over the years, most of which has used cross-sectional, firm-level
survey data, obtained from a single country. Our proposed studies intend to improve evidence on
the antecedents and consequences of CE over a longer time frame and using a large-scale database
covering firms from 25+ European countries. More significantly, drawing on an institutional theory
perspective, we address an important shortcoming in the CE literature, which has largely failed to
consider the possible role of country institutions as antecedents of CE and for the performance
effects of CE. Our proposed studies develop new theory on and empirically examine the role of two
key country institutions, IP protection laws and employee protection laws, which can serve as
antecedents of firms’ CE activities and also moderate the CE-firm performance relationship.