Experimentation and digitalization: Towards a brand-new corporate entrepreneurship?

This paper explores how experimentation and digitalization may influence corporate entrepreneurship in established companies. Experimentation methods for launching new products and originating new business models for startup company - such as lean startup, design thinking, agile, and (more recently) growth hacking - attracted along the years the favour and appreciation of practitioners as well as a growing attention by entrepreneurship scholars. This has much to do with digitalization. Digital technologies created the conditions for running better experiments in scope and scale, helping entrepreneurs to make decision while reducing related risks. While these considerations intuitively may apply also to entrepreneurial actions in established companies, aka "corporate entrepreneurship", few address such challenge. A pressing and relevant question on this regard is "How experimentation and digitalization are influencing corporate entrepreneurship"?; and more, "are experimentation and digitalization changing known corporate entrepreneurship forms (e.g. corporate venturing, strategic renewal, organizational rejuvenation) till leading towards new forms of corporate entrepreneurship?". Due to the debate's novelty and to the depth of the investigation required to grasp the mechanisms and logics of entrepreneurship in established organizations, we conducted an in-depth single case study based on qualitative interviews and additional triangulated sources related to a system integrator firm. System integrators represents an appropriate research setting since they base their core business on providing digital solutions to other firms, and, they are especially in need to keeping pace with the emerging experimenting approaches to entrepreneurship and the development of emerging technologies, thus representing a suitable case for investigation in accordance with our research questions. Our study shows how experimentation methods and digitalization may enhance corporate entrepreneurship in established firms, shading lights on specific managerial practices employed by the company to orchestrate resources and capabilities. Also, we suggest how our findings may support and further develop the traditional exaptation and effectuation theory applied in corporate entrepreneurship.