“Do as we say and you'll be successful”: Mundane power in corporate entrepreneurship

“Do as we say and you'll be successful”: Mundane power in corporate entrepreneurship

“Do as we say and you'll be successful”: Mundane power in corporate entrepreneurship

Lorenzo Skade, Matthias Wenzel, Jochen Koch

kHUB post date: October 3, 2024
Originally published: 05 December 2023 (PDMA JPIM • Vol. 41, Issue 3 • May 2024)
Read time: 70 minutes

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Corporate entrepreneurship is infused with power. Prior research has begun to shed light on the role of power in innovation contexts. Yet, we know much less about the day-to-day enactment of mundane power in corporate entrepreneurship, which, despite its partial subtlety, is no less consequential regarding decisions on pursuing or abandoning innovative ideas. This paper extends the literature on corporate entrepreneurship and power by exploring the discursive practices through which managers and employees of a corporate accelerator disciplined venture founders in the pursuit of innovative ideas. Based on a Foucauldian discourse analysis of ethnographic data, we show how a clash of entrepreneurship discourses invokes the day-to-day performance of three discursive practices—observing, exercising, and punishing—through which the accelerator's staff ensured that venture founders would adopt a dominant entrepreneurship discourse, with important implications for decisions on pursuing innovative ideas or not. These findings deepen our understanding of enacting mundane power in corporate entrepreneurship as well as the enablers and outcomes of such power enactment. We also outline the practical implications for emerging corporate innovation settings such as accelerators.

Practitioner points

  • Managers in accelerators should be careful about the language used in their daily communication. By solely emphasizing growth and profitability, they may thwart the creativity of venture founders.
  • Managers need to be aware of power dynamics in corporate entrepreneurship settings. The implicit focus on dominant understandings of entrepreneurship can reduce control over actions and hinder creative exchange. Instead, managers should focus on leaving room for alternative understandings of how to innovate.
  • Venture founders should be aware of and strategically use power in corporate environments, framing their innovative ideas in alignment with dominant discourses to mobilize support for them.

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