**2.3 Increased study and utilization of corporate entrepreneurship**

The first identified work acknowledging the role of a corporate entrepreneur was dated 1937 [7]. Use of the term, and the discipline itself, did not gain much traction in the subsequent decades. However, CE gained increased focus as an area of scholarly research in the 1980s, when it emerged as its own defined area of innovation [7]. As a research topic, the area of corporate entrepreneurism started a sharp upward trajectory shortly after the turn of the twenty-first century. **Figure 1** depicts the number of scholarly journal articles or books that mentioned the term 'corporate entrepreneurship' somewhere in the document. This data was gathered using successive *Google Scholar* searches for journals or books published over five-year increments between 1946 and 2020.

Despite the focus in this section on the term 'corporate entrepreneurship,' others have used similar terms to describe the innovation process in established organizations. Scholars and researchers have also developed terms such as

#### *Innovation – Research and Development for Human, Economic and Institutional Growth*

#### **Figure 1.** *Number of journal articles or books that use the term "corporate entrepreneurship" from 1946 to 2020.*

'intrapreneurship' [8], 'intrapreneuring' [9], and others have combined terminology, as in 'strategic entrepreneurship' [10]. With these terms their commonality is the process of nurturing and developing innovation within an already existent business to satisfy unmet needs, create value, expand revenue and profit, and develop competitive advantage.

#### **2.4 Corporate entrepreneurship model**

There are many corporate entrepreneurship models widely available. In this chapter, we introduce a model developed by the authors [11] which they advanced from the writings of others [12, 13]. Previous scholars had identified three areas of CE, which were as follows: research and development, corporate venturing, and strategic renewal. The model presented in **Figure 2** expands upon these by aligning various corporate venturing activities with their associated areas.

In **Figure 2**, readers will notice the three categories of CE. Each one has various activities associated with it. Corporate venturing is unique in this model because it defines two distinct types. Here, we identify 'inside-out' methods, meaning originating from inside the corporation and 'outside-in,' which is the opposite. We discuss these activities and the effectiveness of them in a subsequent section of this chapter.

#### **2.5 Levels of innovation**

In the sections above, we described that innovation occurs in various types of organizations such as, private businesses, government agencies and institutions of higher education, and we also identified that it happens at different levels of intensity between these organizations. In this section, we will illustrate that there are different stages of innovation and that these stages happen at different rates within varying corporate organizations.

First, we will identify the different levels of innovation or corporate entrepreneurship. For this, we utilize the Innovation Ambition Matrix which identified three levels *Corporate Entrepreneurship: Innovation in Global, Corporate Environments DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.111805*

**Figure 2.** *Corporate entrepreneurship model.*

of innovation: core, adjacent, and transformational [14]. There are similar models that identify these three levels as the three horizons of growth, which are: H1 or core innovation, H2 or incremental innovation, and H3 or future business, which is characterized by disruption or creating a defense to a disruptive threat from competitors [15].

### *2.5.1 Core innovations*

Core innovations are the development of new products, services, ideas, discoveries, business models, and inventions that are closest to an organization's current business. These developments are closely aligned with the company's existing products and current customers. These are intended to improve the value delivered to current customers. They could include added features that customers see as improving their experience with the product or service. They might also include changes in the company's processes that improve customer experience with the organization. As an example, we can look at the credit card industry. The basic premise of the product is the same today as it was when the modern credit card was developed in 1950 [16]. These allowed consumers to make purchases without using cash. While the basic premise remains the same, the technology embedded in the cards has improved. Initially, merchants had to make physical copies of a customer's card. One decade later, magnetic strips were added to the back of the cards. This allowed the cards to store information about the consumer, and that data could be relayed and stored at a point of sale. This freed merchants from making physical copies. However, there were issues with security and theft of data. For added protection, chips, or what amounted to mini microprocessors, were added to credit cards in the 1980s. These are known as EMV chips for Europay, Mastercard and Visa, the companies that utilize the technology. With this innovation, the chip provided a unique code for each transaction, and it also involved the use of a personal identification number unique to the card holder. Moving forward, the chips have allowed customers to tap and even use their mobile phones to complete a transaction.

#### *2.5.2 Adjacent innovations*

Adjacent innovations are those that are one step away from the organization's current business. The authors of this chapter identify those as 'new to the company' areas of innovation [11]. Netflix's more recent delivery models represent adjacent innovation. Initially, when the company was founded in 1997, it delivered content on video discs, which it sent to subscribers via the postal service. Subscribers would only rent the title they wanted, and then they would send it back to the company in the mail [17]. In 2007, Netflix launched a streaming service, which at the time, it called, 'Watch Now,' [17]. That forever changed the company's delivery model and the way many consumers watch video content to this day.

#### *2.5.3 Transformational innovations*

Transformational innovations are those that develop breakthroughs in products, services, or business models that are designed for markets that do not currently exist. These are revolutionary developments that create completely different markets for the developing companies. Amazon, which we identified earlier as the world's largest investor in innovation, is often used as an example of a company that has developed more than one transformational innovation. Amazon started business in July 1995 as an online book retailer. A year and a half later, its revenues were more than US\$15 million [18]. The online sales model was followed by the development of ebooks, which Amazon launched in 2007 through its Kindle reader. At the time of its launch, a Kindle sold for US\$9.99 [19]. One can consider Amazon's sale of books online as a transformational innovation because it developed a new type of service that offered convenience and a wide-ranging selection to consumers. Of course, Amazon expanded upon its initial success by later selling music CDs online, and then by offering a wide-ranging assortment of goods.

What perhaps is even more of a classic transformational innovation from Amazon is Amazon Web Services (AWS), the company's web services infrastructure. Amazon was the first to market such a service [20]. The idea was spawned during a strategic planning session in 2003. Because of the company's necessity to develop and manage cost-effective and scalable data centers to service its own ecommerce growth, it developed assets and strengths in this realm. Initially, Amazon management did not even realize that it had something unique with data storage that it could commercialize. That developed into AWS, which remained the market leader through the end of 2022, with 32% market share [21]. The development of AWS was a transformational innovation because Amazon management did not realize that data storage was one of its core competencies or that it could scale and sell that service to others. In addition, it developed an entirely new industry which offered flexible, scalable, and more costeffective data storage.

Another transformational innovation that was not initially commercialized by a large, global organization was ChatGPT. It was developed by OpenAI, a U.S. firm based in California and launched in November 2022. ChatGPT is an artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot that uses natural language processing (NLP) and large language models (LLM). It does more than a chatbot because it can write text based on questions that users ask of it. That means, one can generate emails, memos and even essays and research papers using the solution. The researchers who developed ChatGPT indicated that its release was only meant to gather data from users [22]. Instead, it became the fastest growing app in history, reaching 100 million users in just

2 months [23]. In that time, ChatGPT went through several iterations and releases and was being integrated into other platforms. It also stepped-up rivals' efforts to launch their own versions.
