Admission requirements
3rd year Bachelor students
Description
In the quest for sustainable competitive advantage, companies are increasingly finding out that lower costs, higher quality, and better customer service are not sufficient. In times of ongoing globalization and tremendous market and technological change, they must be faster, more agile, and more innovative in order to obtain their competitive edge. In short, companies must be more entrepreneurial.
Entrepreneurial processes are not limited to the domain of independent new ventures, but increasingly also recognized as essential to the long-term viability of already existing organizations. Corporate entrepreneurship (CE) involves the study of entrepreneurial processes and principles as applied within established organizations. It denotes the ability to facilitate and to stimulate the positive features of small firms into larger, established organizations. CE characterizes a new management philosophy that promotes strategic flexibility, agility, creativity, and continuous innovation with the aim of transforming routine employees into intrapreneurs.
In this course we will explore the practices and challenges presented to established companies engaging in CE. It reviews how companies can rely on strategic innovation to continuously renew themselves (i.e. their products or services), their markets, or their industries. As the link between innovation, entrepreneurship and strategic growth has become centrally proclaimed and emphasized, this course is further designed to provide you with a basic understanding of how innovative activities of a company are managed. Companies must do so, because new products based on innovation in a Schumpeterian sense are essential for increased profitability and growth.
We will deal with both the theoretical and practical meaning of CE. Several theoretical perspectives will be discussed, emphasizing both the necessary antecedents of CE and the constraints working against such entrepreneurial behavior. On a practical side, the course will provide you with tools to formulate corporate strategies and to create organizational structures that foster CE. The course is characterized by a multidisciplinary approach as it combines insights from economics, entrepreneurship research, strategic management, psychology, and sociology.
Course objectives
At the end of the course, students should be able to:
Understand and explain the core theories and models in the field of CE;
Evaluate the operations of existing companies with regard to CE;
Evaluate organizational characteristics and processes on how much they enable or constrain CE;
Identify ways to overcome obstacles to CE.
Timetable
Preliminary schedule
Semester 1:
Course: November 10th – December 11th 2020
Exam: December 18th 2020
The latest version of the schedule can be found on the SBB website.
Mode of instruction
The course emphasises small-scale, interactive teaching that focuses on real-life case studies. Students will present CE practices of a company.
Assessment method
Final exam (50%): Open book exam
Group presentations and reports (50%)
In order to pass students must have a total grade of at least a 6 (six). Each component must be at least a 5. The final grade is rounded off to the nearest half or integer.
One week after the final grades are known the inspection date for exam review will be announced at Brightspace.
Reading list
Textbook:
Kuratko, D.F., Morris, M.H., & Covin, J.G. (2011). Corporate Innovation & Entrepreneurship (International Edition). 3rd edition. Mason: South-Western/Cengage Learning. ISBN: 9781111526917.
Selected articles:
Covin, J. G., Slevin, D. (1989). Strategic management in small firms in hostile and benign environments. Strategic Management Journal, 10(1), 75-87.
Fang, C., Lee, J., Schilling, M. (2010). Balancing Exploration and Exploitation Through Structural Design: The Isolation of Subgroups and Organizational Learning. Organization Science, 21(3), 625-642.
Hornsby, J., Kuratko, D., Zahra, S. (2002). Middle managers' perception of the internal environment for corporate entrepreneurship: assessing a measurement scale. Journal of Business Venturing, 17(3), 253-273.
Rauch, A., Wiklund, J., Lumpkin, G. T., Frese, M. (2009). Entrepreneurial Orientation and Business Performance: An Assessment of past Research and Suggestions for the Future. Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, 33(3), 761–787.
Wolcott, R. C., Lippitz, M. J. (2007). The four models of corporate entrepreneurship. MIT Sloan Management Review, 49(1), 75-82.
Registration
Students have to register for the course in uSis. The registration in uSis will open two months before the start of the academic year. Click here for instructions.
This course can only be followed as part of the SBB minor (15 or 30 ECTS).
Contact
Remarks
Students are responsible for enrolling/unenrolling themselves for (partial) exams/retakes.
Students are responsible for enrolling themselves for (partial) exams/retakes.
The deadline for enrolling for an exam/retake is 10 calendar days before the exam/retake takes place (exam date - 10 = deadline enrolling date).
Students who do not enroll themselves for an exam/retake by the deadline are not allowed to take the exam/retake.
Students fail the course if any of the components that make up the final mark of the course is assessed below 5.0.
The final grade is expressed as a whole or half number between 1.0 and 10.0, including both limits. The result is not to be expressed as a number between 5.0 and 6.0.
If one of the components of the final mark constitutes a component that assesses attendance or class participation, students cannot take a retake for this component. Therefore, students fail the course if their mark for this component is less than 5.0.
It is not possible to do retakes for group assignments. Therefore, if students fail the group assignment component, they fail the course.
Students pass the course if the final mark is 6.0 or higher (5.49 will rounded down to a 5 and a 5.5 will be rounded up to a 6.0).
For courses, for which class participation is an assessment component, students may not be penalised for an absence if the student has a legitimate justification for this absence. The student must notify the program coordinator via email (info@sbb.leidenuniv.nl) of such an absence BEFORE the lecture, describing the reason for missing the lecture. If the student does not notify the program coordinator before the lecture, the student will be penalised. Students may be required to provide further documentation to substantiate their case, and class attendance requirements are only waived under exceptional circumstances such as illness.
Students who are entitled to more exam/retake time must report to info@sbb.leidenuniv.nl 10 days before the exam/retake takes place.