Corporate Entrepreneurship Regimes for Sustaining Breakthrough Innovation

The research reported in this paper draws on an ongoing (start date-1995) prospective study of Breakthrough Innovation in large established corporations. We employ multiple case study techniques to identify practices that influence an established firms’ ability to build and sustain a capability in managing breakthrough innovation. A framework for analyzing corporate innovation regimes is proposed that considers individual or champion-centric and organizational approaches in terms of their formalization and coupling to the larger organization. This framework emerged from our multicase analysis of twelve industry leading corporations that have identified systems commercializing breakthrough innovations and from our study of twelve Breakthrough Innovation projects in ten large established companies (four of which are the same companies as the twelve that comprised our sample studying BI programs).Our analysis suggests that there are considerable differences in approaches and activities put in place by our sa...