個案總覽

The COVID-19 emergency has urged companies to operate in new ways to face supply chain interruptions, shifts in customer demand, and risks to workforce health. The organizational ability to respond to critical contingencies is crucial for business leaders in the perspective of continuing business. In our research, we investigate the actions undertaken by 50 world-leading corporations to respond to the pandemic. Applying content analysis to web pages and social network posts, we extract 77 actions related to 13 sub-areas and integrate these into a five-level framework that encompasses operations, customer, workforce, leadership, and community-related responses. We also describe six illustrative company examples of how the emergency can generate opportunities for creating new value. The study advances the scholarly discussion on the impact of emergencies on business continuity and can help leaders define response strategies and actions in the current challenge.

Corporate entrepreneurship is a process of strategic renewal and development of an existing business through the creation of new products, services, and activities, as well as new competitive postures and independent ventures. The performance of this process, which leverages the creativity and the initiative spirit of employees and managers, is thus relying on the capacity of the organization to create favorable conditions for the emergence of such latent entrepreneurial potential. The development of participatory innovation models and collective intelligence offer new insights for conducting research on factors enabling corporate entrepreneurship. In particular, the internal company 'crowd' can be investigated with the purpose to study the conditions under which the corporate entrepreneurship process can be successfully nurtured and conducted. In such view, this article moves from an extended review of corporate entrepreneurship and organizational innovation literature to define the concept of crowdventuring and to present an assessment tool aimed to evaluate the maturity of the crowdventuring process within an organization. The tool, which captures both individual and organization-related factors, is also used for an illustrative application into a multinational IT company. Some implications are also drawn at theory and practitioner levels.