Entrepreneurship in an Organizational Context

Strategic entrepreneurship is quickly emerging as an exciting independent research field. Essentially taken up with how firms can use entrepreneurial actions to create wealth, strategic entrepreneurship lies at the intersection of the opportunity seeking perspective of the entrepreneurship literature and the advantage seeking perspective of strategic management literature. Although the benefits associated with firms engaging in entrepreneurial actions have repeatedly been highlighted, presently little is known about how firms actually pursue entrepreneurial opportunities. While strategic entrepreneurship is defined at the firm-level, entrepreneurial actions are in reality carried out by the firm’s organizational members and not the firm per se. However, little is known about how firms’ entrepreneurial capabilities relate to the actions and interactions of their organizational members. Furthermore, extant literature has predominately been focused on how firms’ may broadly enact pro-entrepreneurship environments and substantially ignored the role played by organizational design elements in structuring and coordinating entrepreneurial actions.
This dissertation addresses these gaps by examining the more micro-level mechanisms of firms’ entrepreneurial capabilities and how organizational design elements can be used to stimulate organizational members’ engagement in entrepreneurial actions. As such, the overarching research question guiding this dissertation is: How does organizational design, through its influence on individual organization members, affect firms’ creation of entrepreneurial outcomes? To answer this question, the dissertation comprises five chapters that individually address gaps in the extant literature and collectively answer the research question. The dissertation underscores and explicates the role of firms’ entrepreneurial organizational members and organizational design in firms’ pursuit of entrepreneurial wealth creation.