Veranstaltungsprogramm der VHB Jahrestagung

For established organizations, internal corporate ventures are a feasible way to act entrepreneurial. To ensure an innovative behavior, the top-level management of the parent firm relies on entrepreneurial templates from the entrepreneurship industry when founding internal corporate ventures. We aim to understand how the adoption of these entrepreneurial templates shapes resource exchange dynamics between the parent firm, its ICV, and the parent firm’s industry.

The entrepreneurship industry promotes its entrepreneurial templates with good intention to foster innovation and entrepreneurial activities. However, the promoted templates come with downsides and the entrepreneurship industry’s ambivalent effects are increasingly recognized. The entrepreneurship industry promotes an overly romanticized lifestyle of entrepreneurship and supports the replication of entrepreneurship culture leading to empty innovation. Previous studies have not explored the consequences of adopting these templates within the context of corporate venturing, nor have they delved into its impact on resource exchange dynamics which play an important role for the success of corporate venturing activities.

This qualitative embedded single case study with 48 interviews (37,5 hours) is context specific and plays within the construction industry. It includes a comprehensive analysis of how these entrepreneurial templates influence resource exchange. Our analysis leverages strategic action fields and considers how the established norms, values, beliefs, and rules of the parent firm, its internal corporate venture, and the parent firm’s industry impact resource exchange.

The study reveals that entrepreneurial templates of the entrepreneurship industry travel to the German Mittelstand, which starts replicating these templates within their internal corporate ventures without questioning their effects. We highlight potential negative effects on the exchange of resources offering a nuanced perspective across the diverse organizational contexts.

Development projects have opened up their activities for decades to legitimate how they address social challenges in the global south. However, openness comes along with struggles and requires legitimacy in the first place. By applying an institutional perspective to open innovation (OI), I explore legitimacy struggles’ and practices to resolve them in the case of development cooperation by drawing on documents of a development project applying open forms of organizing, interviews with project participants from different sectors, and an ethnography in Nepal. The findings show how OI allows for legitimacy of the development project granted by heterogeneous audiences by ‘coupling openness with global beliefs’ related to economic progress, social justice, and participation. Depending on the project phase, openness requires legitimacy as it involves exclusion and resistance of project participants. I observe a shift from OI’s emphasis on establishing organizational legitimacy in the early stage (and late stages) to a growing requirement for legitimacy in middle phases due to closing dynamics. This study contributes to the growing literature on OI by theorizing the altering dynamics of achieving and requiring legitimacy throughout the process as what constitutes OI as a self-sustaining organizing principle. I conclude that the resolution of legitimacy struggles depends much on pragmatic actors on the pragmatically acting, competent, and capable actors involved that navigate arising struggles in a world that appears as intersected by a multitude of conflicts, and attempts to resolve disputes, and navigate uncertain situations.