Evaluating the impact of 'top management team' focus on large company corporate entrepreneurship

The field of corporate entrepreneurship has evolved in response to increasing competitive pressure on companies to innovate and regenerate in order to survive. Corporate entrepreneurship research has focused on the processes involved and in particular how the behaviours of independent entrepreneurs can be adapted to the corporate environment. The role of the top management team, which we define as the board/senior management team, in corporate entrepreneurship has largely been ignored. We are exploring how the focus of the board/senior management team influences a company's corporate entrepreneurship. This paper summarizes theoretical underpinnings for our work and the observations made over the course of a series of pilot interviews involving non-executive directors at two large banks. We observed that the bank with a board that saw itself as entrepreneurial and innovative and comprised a majority former CEOs, followed an entrepreneurial strategy and enjoyed high but volatile long-term growth. In contrast, a second bank with a board that saw itself as operationally focused and was comprised primarily of functional experts, followed a strategy where it sought operational excellence and risk minimisation. The second bank's performance was not as volatile as the first banks and produced lower returns over the long term. The next stage of the project will seek to confirm and expand on these findings by increasing the size of the sample. It will also seek to expand the validity of the study by including companies from other industry sectors in the sample.