Modelling of Barriers Towards the Adoption of Strategic Entrepreneurship: An Indian Context

Abstract

The last three decades have seen focussed research on entrepreneurship and related strategic entrepreneurship. Organisations try to achieve global competitiveness by adopting strategic entrepreneurship. Despite having extensive benefits, we find that strategic entrepreneurship in developing countries is academically understudied. Further, due to several barriers, its adoption in practice is limited. This chapter primarily aims to identify the significant barriers towards adopting strategic entrepreneurship for the strategic management of entrepreneurial organisations. Thus, through expert inputs, twelve barriers were modelled through Interpretive Structural Modelling (ISM). ISM models the interrelationship among the identified barriers so that the organisation can mitigate these barriers effectively. The most significant barriers revealed by the study were ‘strategic entrepreneurship awareness’, ‘lack of entrepreneurship culture’ and ‘limited financial support to knowledge-based firms’. Further, in the next step, MICMAC analysis is applied to assess the identified barrier‘s driving and dependence power. These barriers are clustered into four categories, based on the driving/dependence power, namely autonomous, dependent, linkage and driver clusters. The finding of this study suggests that ‘strategic entrepreneurship awareness’, ‘lack of entrepreneurship culture’ and ‘limited financial support to knowledge-based firms’ are the most significant barriers towards the successful adoption of strategic entrepreneurship. Therefore, management needs to provide greater attention to the mentioned barriers to adopt a strategic perspective towards entrepreneurship. There are three potential implications of this study. The first implication is that it is beneficial for the managers and policy planners to develop mitigation strategies to address these barriers. Secondly, this study is conducted in Indian organisations, and it will help Indian and other developing countries to understand the significant barriers to strategic entrepreneurship. Thirdly, the academic researchers in entrepreneurship will also get deeper insights into facilitating strategic entrepreneurship.