The chapter aims to contribute at the discussion on the role of creativity in sustaining corporate entrepreneurship development by focusing on entrepreneurial learning in the context of incumbent enterprises. Empirical evidences coming from the case study of “Mimprendo” project (www.mimprendo.it), an initiative promoted by the Italian Conference of the University Colleges and the Italian Association of Young Entrepreneurs, are presented. Findings provides insights about the collaborative entrepreneurial learning as happening in the community composed by University students, entrepreneurs, and researchers to solve relevant managerial and entrepreneurial innovation's needs. Those evidences are at the basis of an integrated framework aimed to provide a coherent and a systematic view on the collaborative entrepreneurial learning processes to nurture, select, and implement creative ideas of universities students for sustaining the corporate entrepreneurship in incumbent companies.
TopIntroduction
In the scenario of the entrepreneurial economy (Audretsch & Thurik, 2001), creativity and entrepreneurial learning are two fundamental processes of entrepreneurship (Drucker, 1985): they serve each other and dynamically shape a learning environment and a mindset for growth and value creation in corporation. Entrepreneurship is increasingly seen as a process, which leads to a number of important outcomes for individuals and businesses that are engaged with it, including the creation of new ventures (Shane, 2000; Lumpkin, 2005; Politis, 2005), strategic renewal and restructuring of corporations (Shane and Venkataraman, 2000), innovation and adoption of new technologies (Rae, 2006), new product development, diversifying markets, and new business alliances (Hinrichs et al. 2004). Defined in a schumpeterian perspective, as the ability to respond to the creative processes of change, the Innovative Entrepreneurship has been characterized, in several studies, as a virtuous combination of intellectual capital and market’s opportunities, as the capacity of managing under uncertainty, to assume the risk of a new venture, to be able to identify and exploit previous unexplored opportunities (Byers et al., 2011; Venkataraman, 2004; Romano et al., 2014). Due at the knowledge intensive nature of entrepreneurship, more and more driven by technologies innovation and creativity, the entrepreneurship implies the importance of the ability to cope with the problems and uncertainty and to learn from those problems. As consequence the entrepreneurship arises as a learning process (Cope & Watts, 2000; Minniti & Bygrave, 2001; Rae, 2006; Gemmell et al., 2011) that needs to be sustained continuously at individual and organisational level. As Minniti and Bygrave (2001) state, “entrepreneurship is a process of learning, and a theory of entrepreneurship requires a theory of learning” (p. 7).