Guiding through the Fog: Understanding Differences in the Goal Setting of Corporate Entrepreneurship Programs

Corporate Entrepreneurship (CE) programs are formalized efforts to realize entrepreneurial activities in established companies. Despite the growing and evolving landscape of CE programs, effectively managing them remains a challenging endeavor which results in disappointing outcomes and oftentimes leads to the early termination of such programs. We unmask the differences in goal setting of CE programs and highlight that setting appropriate goals is imperative for their desired outcomes. In practice, companies seem to struggle with the goal setting, and scholars have not yet fully solved the puzzle of goals setting in the context of CE programs either. Therefore, we set out to explore the current state of goal setting in the context of CE programs building upon 61 semi-structured interviews with CE program executives from cross-industry companies with different sizes. Our study contributes to a better understanding of goal setting in the context of CE programs by (1) characterizing the goal setting of CE programs based on goal attributes and goal types and (2) identifying differences among the goal setting of CE programs. We provide implications to practice for a more effective management of CE programs and conclude with a discussion for future research on the impact of the different goal settings.