Analyzing for effective entrepreneurship strategy: A corporate entrepreneurship and innovation course

Abstract

As they grow, companies that were once characterised as agile, innovative and entrepreneurial, tend to become bureaucratic and slow to respond to changes in their environments. In order to stay competitive and build competitive advantage, managers realise that they have to rejuvenate the entrepreneurial spirit and innovate on a sustainable basis, yet this remains a significant challenge for them. Our corporate entrepreneurship and innovation course for post-graduate studentscultivates and understanding of entrepreneurship and innovation in the context of established business. Its unique design, which follows a logical progression of data collection in real-life participating organizations through secondary and primary research, assures in-depth understanding of the factors that shape the current organizational profiles. Students, working in teams, draw on this data and entrepreneurship and innovation theory to develop practical corporate entrepreneurship development plans which they present to their ‘clients’. These plans reflect leadership orientation represented by entrepreneurial visions and strategies, as well as contextualised factors for control in the form of innovation processes and tools. Finally, teams recommend a range of tactics that foster supportive environments for entrepreneurship and innovation. In the process of doing so, students are themselves transformed from being traditional managers to becoming entrepreneurial managers.