Corporate Entrepreneurship - The New Horizon, by Jomanah AlBtoush- Jordan

Modern companies are facing a highly competitive environment in various forms, sources and intensities. One of the key goals and challenges of any organization is to survive and sustain its growth and profitability through strengthening its position in such a turbulent market environment.  Corporate entrepreneurship is one of the main modern concepts that have gained significant position over the past 50 years on both research and application levels (Urban and Nikolov, 2013). 

Engineering consultancy companies constitute a key sector within the global economic development landscape. They represent an example of promising organizations that face a wide range of challenges in their traditional range of services. The main challenges can be summarized in areas of coverage, scales of competition, new competitor’s entries, varieties of services, demanding clients, stakeholder’s requirements and diversity of legislations and regulations, in addition to the effect of political and economic fluctuations. 

The above mentioned factors are the primary driving forces that lead engineering consultancy companies to embark on in-depth business environmental analysis, and strategic planning to boost their abilities to survive, grow, and sustain their accomplishments. 

Consequently, the understanding and applying of different strategic concepts including “Corporate Entrepreneurship” are essential and crucial for engineering consultancy companies. According to Hayton and Kelley, (2006, P.407) corporate entrepreneurship is a group of activities that centers on the discovery and pursuit of new business opportunities through creating new business types or introducing new business models. 

If we have in depth look in the engineering consultancy sector, we can see clearly that this sector is really a dynamic and responsive sector, and has practiced some of corporate entrepreneurship dimensions since awhile through providing new and diverse services and specialties, different from traditional and core range of services, as a response to market needs. E.g. provide environmental, sustainability, feasibility, management services, and training services are new trends now in Engineering Consultancy Companies. 

Finally, it’s the time to investigate, understand and adopt the Corporate Entrepreneurship Concept’s dimensions through: 
• Encourage consultancy engineering companies to consider and practice corporate entrepreneurship in order to achieve renewal, growth and profitability. 
• Further investigation for the application of corporate entrepreneurship in the consultancy engineering companies. Through supporting cooperation between researchers and engineering consultancy sector’s leaders; 
• Develop employees’ entrepreneurship characteristics to improve the overall companies’ performance. trying to develop a clear linkage between employees personal targets and companies targets, and providing windows for personal initiatives; 
• Encourage the exploration of new and potential trends in engineering consulting companies, due to its role in shaping new promising fields and specialties; 
• Support the adoption of moderate risk-taking style in order to capture and exploit new opportunities; and 
• Support innovative ideas and methods by formulating a clear system, to ensure generating wide range of innovative and applicable ideas that support companies development.