Corporate Entrepreneurship and Innovation

Abstract

There is an increasing interest of research on the area of corporate entrepreneurship recently. But much focus is given to specific areas. like the definitional  issues  in  the  field  of  corporate  entrepreneurship (Sharma  P,  Chrisman  JJ  1999) ,developing and refining an instrument (Kuratko et al,1990; Hornsby et al,2002;Morris et al 2001; Tasika. M.Davis 2006;  Adonisi 2003),linking corporate entrepreneurship to strategy, structure, and process(Lumpkin and Dess 1999) the relationship between corporate entrepreneurship and strategic management (Barringer and Bluedorn,1999). An investigation of the internal organizational entrepreneurial climate and its relationship with innovativeness is generally scarce. Thus, by developing a model which relates corporate entrepreneurial variables with innovation, this study investigates the functional relationship between the two. Furthermore, the study tries to analyse the prevalence of corporate entrepreneurship and the level of innovation in Ethiopian leather footwear industry. Using analytical survey design in a cross sectional time, 6 leather footwear companies were selected judgmentally from Addis Ababa. The descriptive analysis showed that all the corporate entrepreneurial variables are below average on a five point likert scale measure. The level of innovation is also rated as average on a similar scale. Results of correlation matrix also indicated a positive association between the corporate entrepreneurial variables and innovation. furthermore, Regression analysis showed that reward system as well as time availability contributed the highest for innovation than the rest of the variables and evaluation of the regression model indicated around 48 %  of the variance in innovation can be explained by the model and that the model was statistically significant. The findings in this study are so important for managers and other policy makers to find out how organizational and managerial variables could be modified in order to facilitate innovation. It is recommended that other studies should try to replicate these findings on different contexts.

Key Words: Competitiveness, Corporate Entrepreneurship, Ethiopia, Innovation, leather.