Exploring Corporate Entrepreneurship Antecedents in Iranian Large Private Organizations

Scholars name the current era as the global revolution of innovation and believe that innovation and entrepreneurship today are the main factors of value creation. The impact of entrepreneurial activities on companies' success has attracted researchers to motivating or restrictive factors. Iranian organizations, like other organizations around the world, are presented with complicated environments and conditions, and there is a growing need for innovation and entrepreneurship. Although, whether antecedents of the corporate entrepreneurship in Iranian organizations are consistent with those identified in other countries remains unanswered. What are the main barriers to implementing corporate entrepreneurship in Iranian organizations? This research, through conducting semi-structured interviews with 14 top and middle managers from 10 large Iranian private companies, while using the thematic analysis method, attempts to answer these questions. Results show that the most important environmental obstacle in Iran is the lack of a comprehensive industrial development plan. Moreover, the main distinguishing organizational internal factor of the firms studied in this research in comparison with other organizations that have been studied in literature is the "non-separation of manager from the owner and entrepreneur", which can be considered as the most significant finding of this research.