Re‐orienting the Corporate Entrepreneurial Journey: Exploring the Role of Middle Management

In this article we report research on the implementation of an increased exploitative market orientation in explorative technology‐driven firms, and how the interaction between middle management and the internal context shapes this process. It appears that middle managers play an important role in balancing planned and emergent activities, reconciling market and technological understandings, and negotiating and sanctioning ideas. These roles do not happen automatically. Dominant logics, mindsets and meanings, developed and successful in the past, ‘talk back’. Managerial systems and processes supporting the transition to more and more successful market exploitation are not automatically accepted. Rather, all these and similar changes need to be socially negotiated. In that process, the opportunities and incentives for middle managers to reach beyond their formal job and to engage in the organizational sense‐making process play a key role.