Addressing and Assessing the Entrepreneurial Orientation of an Organisation: A theoretical framework and operational protocol consisting of a contextual process model of corporate entrepreneurship and a cognitive mapping approach

This research takes its stance from the corporate discipline of entrepreneurship, which is synonymously defined as the academic domain of “corporate entrepreneurship”. This discipline views management and employees as interacting and intellective entities of an organisational (social and interpretative) system from which entrepreneurial actions are pursued, initiated and executed for the benefit of organisational performance and individual development. The purpose of this interpretive research is to explore, identify, analyse and visualise the strategic entrepreneurial processes within organisations. The research objectives include the development of an appropriate language to discuss the strategic organisational processes that exist in entrepreneurial firms that support and develop their entrepreneurial orientation. To achieve this objective, a theoretical framework is developed in the form of a contextual process model of corporate entrepreneurship together with the development of a methodological framework, i.e. operational protocol, for exploring the socially constructed phenomena of corporate entrepreneurship and for applying the contextual process model to real life organisational contexts. The other main research objective focuses on establishing to what extent this theoretical and methodological framework is effective as a tool to understand, assess and improve the entrepreneurial orientation of an organisation. The methodological framework proposed and applied in this research consists of a case research approach for relevant and meaningful information gathering, a cognitive mapping approach for the structuring of complex qualitative data and an operational comparison method called the EDI-framework (expectation, desirability and importance) as an interpretative data analysis method.Submitted in fulfillment of the requirements of the degree of Doctor of Business Administration, University of the Sunshine Coast, 2003