Innovation and entrepreneurship: Managing the paradox of purpose in business model innovation

Abstract

This paper explores the paradox between innovation and entrepreneurship in the context of business model innovation. Innovation focused companies develop policies to enhance human capital and develop a broad base of relationships that generate new ideas and directions. This seems paradoxical to corporate entrepreneurship that seeks to leverage particular intellectual properties through a market focus and penetration. A culture of innovation on the one hand is inefficient due to its nature of experimentation, broad relationship base and interests in discovery while corporate entrepreneurship seeks to capitalise on innovation through the business model to gain scale efficiencies and profitability. The paper concludes by proposing a multi-perspective conceptual framework to capture and represent the shifts in intellectual capital needed to manage these intertwined concepts.