Board entrepreneurial potential and corporate entrepreneurship

Many companies have sought to adopt the approaches used by entrepreneurs in small companies to achieve growth and performance improvement. The field of corporate entrepreneurship investigates the strategies that are successfully used by such companies and the benefit that they enjoy from using those strategies. One area that appears to have attracted limited attention is how a company’s board of directors influences its corporate entrepreneurship initiatives. This paper presents research that explores how entrepreneurship is influenced by Boards of Directors at large publicly listed Australian commercial banks. A model based on Krueger’s construct of Entrepreneurial Potential is proposed and tested. The research uses a case study methodology and involves analysis of in-depth interviews with members of the Boards of Directors of four banks. The data supports the model and the shows a positive association between the construct Board Entrepreneurial Potential and Corporate Entrepreneurship. The authors propose that if a company is to be entrepreneurial, the attitudes and perceptions of its Board must be changed either before or as a consequence of management’s actions.