Articles
DOI DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.18485410

Corporate Entrepreneurship in Mature Firms: Evidence from Digital Transformation

Julian Birkinshaw1
  1. 1 Ivey Business School, Western University

Abstract

Corporate entrepreneurship in mature firms is shaped less by stand-alone "innovation programs" than by the informational and organisational infrastructure that governs how opportunities are identified, evaluated, and scaled. This study develops and empirically examines a firm-year model linking digital transformation intensity to innovation-based corporate entrepreneurship using publicly available archival data. Digital transformation is operationalised with a validated text-based measure derived from Item 1 (business disclosures in the U.S.). 10-K filings for S&P 1500 firms (2002–2020), constructed using term-frequency and TF-IDF approaches. Corporate entrepreneurship is proxied by granted patent output and forward citations assembled from PatentsView bulk tables and matched to firms via a conservative, auditable linkage procedure. To mitigate simultaneity and exploit within-firm variation over time, we estimate fixed-effects panel models with lagged transformation measures. The research design prioritises transparency and replicability: all inputs are public, and the end-to-end workflow can be reproduced using standard data engineering steps (bulk relational joins, name normalisations, and high-precision matching rules with ambiguity controls). The study contributes by translating digital transformation into a time-varying empirical construct and by documenting its association with scalable innovation outcomes in mature firms. The findings have governance implications for transformation efforts, suggesting that value creation is more likely when transformation strengthens the firm’s experimentation and coordination capacity, rather than when it is limited to automating legacy routines.

How to Cite

Birkinshaw, J. (2025). Corporate Entrepreneurship in Mature Firms: Evidence from Digital Transformation. Transnational Academic Journal of Economics, 2(1), 26–41. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18485410
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