Corporate entrepreneurship managers often need to terminate projects to maximize their innovation portfolios’ commercial prospects. Drawing on the attention–based view of the firm, we develop a model for how past project failure experience, the firm's growth rate, and their hierarchical level impact managers’ attention to a project's fit with the corporate portfolio strategy and the balance of the portfolio when terminating projects. Using data from a conjoint study with 6,944 assessments of project terminations made by 217 managers, we provide insights into corporate entrepreneurship decision making and how portfolio–level, individual–level, and firm–level aspects interact in explaining project termination.

Research and development (R&D) generates projects, but the question often remains: which projects should be exploited? Building on the innovation, strategy, and managerial cognition literatures, we use a conjoint field experiment to collect data on 4032 decisions made by 126 R&D managers to test how project attributes, strategic context, and managers' characteristics influence innovation exploitation decisions. Using hierarchical linear modeling, we find that (1) experience impacts project exploitation decision policies of middle managers more than senior managers, (2) divergent thinking across middle and senior managers increases with experience, and (3) experienced middle managers diverge from experienced senior managers in their decisions to exploit opportunities by placing greater emphasis on strategic context (relative to competitors and fit within the portfolio) and lesser emphasis on uncertainty (technological and demand). These findings have implications for the strategy and innovation literature.

The purpose of this experimental study is to test whether specific approaches can reduce escalation of commitment—namely, decision‐makers' tendency to persist with an innovation project despite negative feedback that the initial investment has not reached its goals. This study focuses on the decision process for 137 research and development managers who must decide whether to abandon previously chosen courses of action or to continue in the face of probable and increasing losses in a stage‐gate system. The results show that visual decision aids and consultant advice reduce managers' decisions to continue funding a losing course of action. The results also show that using both approaches simultaneously has the strongest effect. Finally, the study reveals that the escalation of commitment issue can be reduced more effectively before an innovation project is commercialized while using both approaches.

Organizational ambidexterity is vital for family firms’ long-term success, yet we still lack sufficient insights into the role of family involvement in top management in this context. Building on research on family firm innovation and diversity, we argue there are curvilinear relationships between family involvement in top management and exploration, exploitation, and organizational ambidexterity. We further propose that these (inverse) U-shaped relationships are affected by family CEOs’ family-centered noneconomic goals. Multisource data on 109 family-managed firms support most of our hypotheses and provide a nuanced understanding of how diversity within top management affects family firms’ innovative behavior.

Although scholars have independently explored the antecedents of innovation radicalness and innovation speed, this study's focus on combinations of radicalness and speed offers a number of new insights. Drawing on a comparative case study approach of ten innovation departments of large organizations, the authors’ findings provide evidence that intrinsic rewards trigger innovation radicalness, but the simultaneous presence of extrinsic rewards diminishes innovation speed. Further, the authors show that the availability of high levels of non‐financial resources increases innovation radicalness, but the additional provision of high levels of financial resources leads to a slower process of developing these radical innovations to market. The analysis also uncovers the mechanisms by which extrinsic rewards and financial resources slow down the development of radical innovations. The authors discuss the implications of these findings for the literature on innovation management and managerial practice.