INTRODUCTION:

Entrepreneurship is at the core of capitalistic economy (Baumol, 1993) and hence is of great interest to the researchers, managers and policy-makers. Its potential benefits include creation of business (Gartner, 1985), financial benefits (Ireland, Hitt, Camp, and Sexton, 2001), competitive advantage (Zahra, 1991), etc. Most of the studies regarding entrepreneurship have focused on individuals, start-ups and the discoveries they make (Miller, 1983; Morris and Kuratko, 2002). As seen today, entrepreneurship is one of the most effective instruments of economic development. It has the capability to provide employment opportunities to many and ensure infrastructural development in its surrounding environment.

Among the basic elements of entrepreneurship are: willingness to take risks, formulate teams, organize resources and capabilities, planning and the vision to see through a highly ambiguous situation where others can just see chaos, contradiction and confusion. Entrepreneurship may take the form of corporate entrepreneurship, social entrepreneurship, strategic entrepreneurship etc. In the present study we are concerned with a very recent form of entrepreneurship i.e. strategic entrepreneurship which combines various aspects from two different fields: strategic management and entrepreneurship.

Hitt et al, 2001 explain that strategic entrepreneurship is concerned with simultaneous portrayal of opportunity seeking and advantage seeking behaviors which results in providing higher value to the stakeholders including individuals, organisations and the society. It can be viewed as an extension of the concept of entrepreneurial strategy making which is the combination of multiple strategies with the external environment given by Mintzberg and Waters (1982).

Business organisations in 21^st century are facing innumerable challenges and problems due to increasing risk, decreasing forecasting ability etc. Researchers like Bettis and Hitt, 1995; Hitt and Reed, 2000; explain this situation arising due to four forces: change, complexity, chaos and contradictions. None of the organisations is immune to these forces. Ability of an organisation to pass through such dynamic environment and the difficulties faced in combining the disciplines of entrepreneurship, strategic management and economics are the focus of scholars in present day scenario. Researchers propose that combining the fields of entrepreneurship and strategic management can provide solution to these problems which are being faced by the present day organisations. The present study serves to understand this new concept at the gross root level but with special emphasis on its various models that have been proposed so far. This study will serve the following purposes:

OBJECTIVES OF THE STUDY:

1. To understand the theoretical base of the field of strategic entrepreneurship by studying its various models that have been proposed so far.

2. To make a comparison between the major models proposed by the researchers.

REVISITING THEORIES AND MODELS OF STRATEGIC ENTREPRENEURSHIP:

^{Strategic
Entrepreneurship has emerged progressively over the last decade as the
intersection between strategic management and entrepreneurship. Since then
researchers have continuously pushed their envelope to know what constitutes
this concept and what not. Many underlying models and theories have been
proposed since then presenting different constituents/dimensions and the
pattern of the integration of strategic management and entrepreneurship i.e.
Strategic Entrepreneurship. Some of the most important ones in this regard are
discussed below:}

1. Ireland, Hitt and Sirmon (2003) proposed a model of Strategic Entrepreneurship (SE) which unfolds its dimensions at four distinct levels. At the first level is proposed the entrepreneurial mindset along with its key components. To successfully employ Strategic Entrepreneurship, entrepreneurial mindset is required. Both entrepreneurs and managers need it to behave and act entrepreneurially. McGrath and MacMillan (2000) view it as a way of fetching benefits from uncertainty, as it enables them to identify and exploit new opportunities because of their cognitive abilities to provide meaning to meaningless situations and organisations which are capable of doing so are able to outrun others in the race (Brorstrom, 2002). Hence it can be used to create competitive advantage and sustain in the highly dynamic and competitive market (Miles, Heppard, Miles and Snow, 2000). This in turn helps to create wealth in the organisation. Its major components include: identification of entrepreneurial opportunities, entrepreneurial alertness, entrepreneurial framework and the real options available. The second level unveils entrepreneurial culture and leadership as key dimensions of the Strategic Entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurial culture supports the continuous identification and exploitation of opportunities to create sustainable competitive advantage (McGrath and MacMillan, 2000). Entrepreneurial culture expects new ideas and creativity in the firm environment, encourages risk-taking, tolerance for failure, promotion of organisational learning and continuous change is expected to ensure organisational survival. When leaders in the organisation exhibit entrepreneurial mindset, the entrepreneurial culture is born there and this paves the way for successful deployment of Strategic Entrepreneurship. Covin and Slevin, 2002; Ireland and Hitt, 1999; Rowe, 2001 propose that entrepreneurial leadership is the ability to influence others to manage resources in such a way that both advantage seeking and opportunity seeking behaviors are exhibited. This is characterized by six imperatives as per Covin and Slevin, 2002: Nourishing entrepreneurial capability, protecting innovations that threaten the current business model, making sense of opportunities, questioning the dominant logic, revisiting the previous simple questions and linking strategy and entrepreneurship.

The third level explains that how managing organisational resources effectively can lead to advantage and opportunity seeking behaviors of the organisations. These resources are financial capital, human capital and social capital. Researchers indicate that a proper resource portfolio, achieved through bundling (Eisenhardt and Martin, 2000; Kogut and Zander, 1992; Sirmon, Hitt and Ireland, 2003) and leveraging (Barney and Arikan, 2001), can significantly contribute to higher firm performance (Sirmon and Hitt, 2003). This in turn facilitates the firm’s efforts to create wealth. At the fourth level, applying creativity to develop innovations is portrayed as the crucial outcome of an entrepreneurial mindset, culture, leadership and strategic management of resources. The importance of creativity in innovation can be retrieved from the work of Schumpeter (1934, 1942). He discusses that innovativeness leads to economic development and is the key driver of corporate growth and wealth creation. New combinations of existing resources are the basic essence of innovation as per Schumpeter. This may be in the form of a new product, new production process, new source of raw materials, new market for the existing product etc. It enhances the efforts of firms to create greater wealth. Researchers have linked innovation directly to the performance of firms and economies. It acts as a catalyst and provides enhanced value to the customers (Mizik and Jacobson, 2003).

In an organisation the tussle between sustaining (Exploitation oriented) and disruptive innovations (Exploration oriented) is always going on. Firms have to engage in both the types of innovation. But through Strategic Entrepreneurship, a proper mix of both is suggested to ensure greater wealth.

2. Hitt, Ireland, Sirmon and Trahms (2011): Researchers (Kyrgidou and Hughes, 2010) proposed that the earlier model of Strategic Entrepreneurship, which consisted of four broad dimensions, lacked the basic robustness to capture the gestalt. So, to provide a better understanding of SE, a new multi-level model was proposed called Input-Process-Output model. This model incorporates the focus of environmental factors, organisational and individual resources into the highly dynamic process of advantage and opportunity seeking behaviors. Dimensions identified by the model include: inputs or resources, orchestration of these resources via some process and an output.

In the first stage, all the firm resources are looked at with an equal emphasis on the various environmental factors affecting the operations. Culture and leadership are the idiosyncratic resources of any organisation. Leaders understand the value of developing entrepreneurial culture which is best suited to develop sustainable competitive advantage for the organisations. The other resources are the financial, human and social capital which is basic to any organisation. Organization’s resources have a significant impact on its operations which typically affects its performance. Also the impact of firm’s external environment on its performance has already been established by researchers (Keats and Hitt, 1988; Dess and Beard, 1984). The environmental dynamism makes organisations to make adjustments in their structure, business model etc to ensure their survival. It has a substantial impact on how firms react to the acquisition of their raw materials, resource orchestration etc.

In the second stage, these resources are orchestrated in such a way using entrepreneurial actions that current resources are protected and exploited while new resources are looked for, creating new value and simultaneously displaying opportunity seeking and advantage seeking behaviors. Resource orchestration is typically concerned with the efforts that managers take to effectively manage the organisational resources. It involves structuring and restructuring the resource portfolio of the organisation via acquiring, divesting and accumulating, bundling its resources into capabilities through stabilizing existing capabilities, developing new capabilities and enriching the already existing ones and leveraging these capabilities by mobilizing them, to create value for the customers. This in turn helps to create sustainable competitive advantage for the firm. A growing body of researchers is in support of the same including Ndofor, Sirmon and He (2011).

And lastly different outcomes are analyzed at different levels in this model of SE. This model proposes different outcomes as a result of deploying Strategic Entrepreneurship in the organisations including: achieving competitive success, value for equity holders of the firm, wealth for owners, financial wealth, socio-emotional wealth etc. It also leads to increase in economic activity in a country which eventually leads to the various societal benefits. The individual benefits accrued from this include satisfaction from developing and running a new venture, increase in financial wealth, learning, self-actualization, respect, esteem etc.

The organisation gains by developing sustainable competitive advantage to survive and grown in highly competitive and dynamic business markets. While as society gains in terms of the employment opportunities, infrastructure development, overall economic development etc. it gains from such actions of the firms. This model argues that for such outcomes, several interim outcomes have to be achieved like creating new technologies, developing innovations, achieving competitive advantage etc and this is possible only through the efficient and effective deployment of the overall model of Strategic Entrepreneurship in the organizations

3. Siren, Kohtamaki and Kuckertz (2012) view exploration and exploitation as two very different strategic actions. While exploration represents entrepreneurial actions which enable firms to identify and grab new opportunities which emerge beyond the scope of current strategies in the market, exploitation enables firms to exploit current competitive advantage by efficiently and effectively using the current resources and capabilities to improve the design of the products/services/customer satisfaction etc. Exploration strategies are formed by enhancing the innovation tendency of the firm towards the technology or processes it uses, studying its current market segment, customers etc. It allows firms to enhance their opportunity identification, development of new knowledge and capabilities which are essential for long term survival and prosperity. Exploitation strategy on the other hand reduces variety of the organisation by enhancing its operational efficiency and increasing its tendency to adapt to the changing business environment. But a proper mix of both of these is what is required by firms to compete successfully.

Both exploration and exploitation, mediated by strategic learning significantly influence the firm performance as per this model. During exploration, strategic learning is facilitated via the entrepreneurial process of searching for opportunities, discovery of the same and experimenting with the various feasible opportunities. During this process, organization scans its environment which provides the basic impulse for strategic learning. Sharing of strategic knowledge allows individuals in the organizations to pass on their personal experience, ideas and insights to others. This way explorative idea are disseminated in the organisation enabling individuals to develop a shared understanding and mutual consensuses regarding the new strategic knowledge acquired and implement it via knowledge implementation process. This is then incorporated into the formal organisational system, procedures etc to guide the actions of organisational members to achieve some common goal. This model proposes that since entrepreneurial behaviour is risky and mostly fails, strategic learning enables it to know what the possible cause was and enables it to change it in future so that next time the same efforts become successful. This model discusses that both exploitation and exploration strategies don’t directly influence the firm performance but it occurs through the strategic learning process. Actually the strategic knowledge acquired through the exploration strategy (entrepreneurial behavior) is shared via strategic learning process and incorporated into the organisational structure. It then guides all members of the firm towards some common goal.

This model has incorporated four firm level controls including firm size, firm age, slack resources and dynamism of the environment. While firm age significantly influences the profit performance of the firm, firm size and slack resources influence the strategic learning in the organisation. This model discusses that for firms to avail the benefits of Strategic Entrepreneurship, they have to ensure that they learn strategically from their opportunity-seeking and advantage-seeking behaviors. This will in turn facilitate their pursuit of higher profit performance.

4. Rezaian and Naeiji (2012) proposed a model where Strategic Entrepreneurship and Intellectual capital are mediated by competitive advantage to have a significant impact on the organisational performance. Consistent with the prior researches, this model indicates that both Strategic Entrepreneurship (Ketchen et al.., 2007; Kyrgidou and Hughes, 2010) and intellectual capital (Leitner and Guldenberg, 2010; and Lu, et al. (2010) can significantly influence the firm performance. They propose that organisations should not only focus on their tangible assets but a proper attention to the intangible assets, like relationships with the various stakeholders like customers, suppliers etc; knowledge sharing culture; talent and knowledge level of employees etc, should also be ensured for higher organisational performance and growth. Consistent with the findings of Ireland et al. (2003) entrepreneurial mindset, proper mix of exploration and exploitation strategies and continuous innovation are portrayed as major dimensions of Strategic Entrepreneurship. Among them, it is the entrepreneurial mindset which is the most important one. Among the major elements of intellectual capital, as proposed by the model, are: human capital, relational capital and the structural capital. All of these dimensions when operated together in an entrepreneurial environment lead to a sustainable competitive advantage, which eventually results in higher firm performance.

5. Lassen (2007) proposed an integrative model of Strategic Entrepreneurship which highlights the importance of incorporating strategic considerations at several levels of organisational structure to ensure a proper balance between entrepreneurial and strategic forces operating in the firm. This model proposes an iterative integration rather than a sequential development of the Strategic Entrepreneurship process. This model calls on the part of organisations to always be ready for exploring new opportunities and exploiting the already existing ones in new ways to create sustainable competitive advantage. This calls to integrate entrepreneurial and strategic orientations which are made at the individual, group and the top management level. This will require an entrepreneurial mindset and leadership in an entrepreneurial culture facilitating strategic management of resources to create competitive advantage which is eventually made to exhibit higher value creation for the firm. All of this has to be ensured in an innovative setting as per this model.

Source: Lassen (2007)

Figure 5- Integrative model of Strategic Entrepreneurship by Lassen (2007)

Ireland et al., 2001	Hitt, et al., 2001	Ireland, et al., 2003	Ireland and Webb, 2007	Ketchen, et al., 2007
Innovation	Innovation	Applying creativity to develop innovation	Continuous innovation	Collaborative innovation
Networks	External networks and alliances		Variation in organisational activity like mergers, alliances etc
Internationalization	Internationalization
Organisational learning	Resources and Organisational learning	Managing resources strategically	Organisational structure
Growth
Top management teams and governance				Managerial mindset for broader capabilities
		Entrepreneurial culture and leadership	Organisational culture
		Entrepreneurial mindset	Balancing advantage and opportunity seeking behaviors	Balancing advantage and opportunity seeking behaviors

This model also highlights the importance of developing the Strategic Entrepreneurship consciousness at the group level in the organisation to ensure actual development of innovations.

Comparison of major models:

A brief comparison of the major models of strategic entrepreneurship in terms of their contributing dimensions is given above table.

The above table clearly figures out the various dimensions which have been proposed by different researchers for Strategic Entrepreneurship. It is worthwhile to mention here that the only dimension which is common in all these models is innovation in its different forms. Rest of the dimensions keeps changing with the researchers.

In addition to these models, there are several theories which help in understanding the underlying base of Strategic Entrepreneurship including: network theory, learning theory, resource-based theory etc. Network theory explains how the different types of relationships within an organisation and with other organisations can help a firm increase its capability to create wealth. They actually interact and create alliances with others and learn from their experiences, shortcomings, achievements etc. On the other hand Learning theory discusses that organizations’ capability to receive knowledge and implementing the learning from this knowledge in the organisational structure, operational activities etc can help it improve its performance. Both of these theories explain that an organisation gets to know exactly what is happening in their business environment both internal and external, what opportunities are there for them and how can they create a competitive advantage for themselves and how can they grab the opportunities identified in the market. This helps them portray advantage-seeking and opportunity-seeking behaviors simultaneously. Similarly Resource based theory, which has its base in strategic management, can explain how firms can use different types of resources it has and that effective and efficient handling of these resources can help it achieve competitive advantage by ensuring an effective portfolio. All of these theories are of great help in understanding the underlying theoretical perspective of Strategic Entrepreneurship.

CONCLUSION:

The basic aim of this study was to provide a brief overview of the major models and theories that explain the simultaneous portrayal of opportunity and advantage seeking behaviors by entrepreneurs in their ventures. We found four major dimensions of Strategic Entrepreneurship are predominantly significant in current scenario including: entrepreneurial mindset, entrepreneurial culture and leadership, strategic management of resources and applying creativity to develop innovations. We found that most significant contribution in this field has been made by Hitt, Ireland, Sirmon and Trahms. We also found that the dimensions of Strategic Entrepreneurship have changed since the inception of this concept, but the only common dimension since then has been innovation.

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Received on 22.09.2018 Modified on 09.11.2018

Res. J. Humanities and Social Sciences. 2019; 10(1):73-79.

DOI: 10.5958/2321-5828.2019.00013.5