Entrepreneurial Management: Essays on (corporate) venture creation and business model innovation

This publication-based dissertation examines (corporate) venturing and business model innovation intending to derive implications for entrepreneurial management in firms. To achieve this, four self-contained research papers have been developed which are the core of this dissertation. The first section serves as a general introduction, outlines the motivation for each of the research topics, and presents a summary of the research papers and their publication status. The first research paper (Section 2) is a systematic literature review that summarizes and structures three decades of research on the field of success measurement of corporate venturing activities. It identifies three structural dimensions which allow the creation of nine meaning clusters by which the existing measurement approaches can be grouped and compared. Additionally, the review reveals the heterogeneity of these approaches and the unique measurement items which they include. The third section is an empirical study on new venture creation activities in the early stage, based on 112 interviews with novice and experienced entrepreneurs. It defines three dimensions of entrepreneurial activity, namely, Entrepreneurial Alignment, Resource Enhancement, and Value Generation, and finds 67 actions, which differ across these groups in type and sequence. Section four is a single case study in business model innovation that investigates the recent rebranding of “Facebook” to “Meta”. It finds that, despite the strong communication efforts and the resulting internal and external signaling effects, this change does not correspond to a radical business innovation pattern. The fourth research study (Section 5) is a conceptual study that develops an integrated framework for business model innovation in service industries, based on research on the tourism industry. It highlights the limitations of siloed approaches under the influence of internal and external challenges such as industry dynamics and resource constraints. Section six summarizes the dissertation, highlighting the overall contributions for research and practice, and discusses the limitations and directions for future research