Navigating a Typology of Corporate Entrepreneurial Strategies: The Case of Unilever

This chapter presents a typology of entrepreneurial strategies. It responds to recent calls in research to examine the theoretical underpinnings of corporate entrepreneurial strategies. The typology explains underlying structural dimensions of how entrepreneurial strategies, such as bootlegging, skunkwork, bricolage, and guided evolution, differ, in respect to the origin of an entrepreneurial initiative and the resource availability for an entrepreneurial initiative. In the chapter, the typology is used to examine an exemplary longitudinal case study at Unilever. The Unilever Knorr case exemplifies how managers in practice navigate different entrepreneurial strategies to overcome the corporate immune system. It finds dynamically evolving situations, where new sources of corporate resistance continually arise, navigating between corporate entrepreneurship modes could be more a viable approach for understanding the mechanisms of corporate entrepreneurial initiatives. As such, this chapter contributes to the understanding of how entrepreneurial strategies are a priori choice and in situ navigation depending on the organizational context and furthers the discussion of important underlying structural dimensions for navigating corporate entrepreneurial strategies.