ABSTRACT
There is a widespread recognition that entrepreneurship is not simply an individual matter but also refers to characteristics of entire organizations. In that context, the key features of organizations are their entrepreneurial orientation. Since the pioneering paper by Miller (1983), a sizable literature has grown up that investigates the entrepreneurial activity of the firm and employs measures of the degree to which a firm can be classified as entrepreneurial (Covin and Slevin, 1989; Lumpkin and Dess, 1996; Zahra, 1996; Shane and Venkataraman, 2000; Shane, 2003; Wiklund and Shepherd, 2003; Salaran and Maritz, 2009). Entrepreneurial orientation (EO) is seen as consisting of a number of different dimensions. Miller and Friesen (1982, 1983), Miller (1983) and Covin and Slevin (1989) have defined entrepreneurially oriented organizations as those that are innovative, proactive (pioneering) and risk taking. More precisely, according to Miller (1983: 771) ‘an entrepreneurial firm is one that engages in product-market innovation, undertakes somewhat risky ventures, and is first to come up with “proactive” innovations’. For Covin and Slevin (1989: 77) ‘entrepreneurial firms are those in which the top managers have entrepreneurial top management styles, as evidenced by the firms’ strategic decisions and operating management philosophy’.
