Understanding the Corporate Entrepreneurial Mindset: a Multimethod Approach to its Nature and Dynamics

The entrepreneurial mindset - defined as the ability and willingness to sense, act and mobilise, responding to a judgmental decision under uncertainty - is recently embraced by both academica and practice as a useful concept capturing individuals' 'the entrepreneurialness'. Yet, research still leaves room for understanding the entrepreneurial mindset completely and comprehensively (What is it? What does it entail? How and when does it work?). Moreover, research still seems to lack a way to meaningfully contextualize the entrepreneurial mindset, particular within organizations. The latter is often described as corporate entrepreneurship (i.e., entrepreneurship within an organizational context).

My dissertation focuses on answering the former questions, providing meaningful answers for organisations to understand what they can do to stimulate employees' entrepreneurial mindset. Before being able to use the entrepreneurial mindset, we need to know exactly what it is and develop a complete and comprehensive understanding of the concept, through theory development. More so, we need to grasp it within a corporate context by defining it and operationalising it. This dissertation thus aims to answer the question, “How can organisations utilise employees’ entrepreneurial mindset to stimulate entrepreneurial initiatives?”. A needed answer that inherently provides a nuanced perspective on other, more long-lasting, questions, such as “who is an entrepreneur” (Gartner, 1988), “are opportunities objective or subjective” (McBride & Wuebker, 2020), “what do we know about the individual-opportunity nexus” (Davidsson, 2004) and “can entrepreneurs be made” (Sarasvathy et al., 2020). Ultimately, we provide more nuanced interpretations, allowing future research to delve deeper into these questions.