Entrepreneurial orientation (EO)—a firm's strategic posture towards entrepreneurship—has become the predominant construct of interest in strategic entrepreneurship research. Despite the ever‐increasing volume of nomological research on EO, there remain ongoing conversations regarding its ontology. Drawing from measurement theory, we outline an EO reconceptualization addressing the likely prevalence of Type II nomological error in the EO literature stemming from measurement model misspecification. Focusing on the question of whether EO is an attitudinal construct, a behavioral construct, or both, we propose a formative construction of EO viewing the exhibition of entrepreneurial behaviors and of managerial attitude towards risk as jointly necessary dimensions that collectively form the higher‐order EO construct. We present an empirical illustration of our reconceptualization followed by a discussion of future research opportunities. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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Research summary:This paper posits adaptive capability as a mechanism through which a firm's prior growth influences the exhibition of future entrepreneurial action. Defined as the firm's proficiency in altering its understanding of market expectations, increased adaptive capability is a consequence of the new resource combinations that result from expanding organizational boundaries. Increased adaptive capability in turn corresponds to expansion of entrepreneurial activity, as firms increase their entrepreneurial orientation as the strategic mechanism to capitalize on their improved understanding of market conditions. We find support for our research model in a two-study series conducted in South Korea and the United Kingdom.Managerial summary: Most would agree that entrepreneurially oriented firms-being innovative, entering new markets, and taking risk-grow faster. But how a firm becomes entrepreneurial is a complicated question. In this study, we flipped the growth relationship around and found support for growth contributing to a firm's entrepreneurial orientation. But between growth and being more entrepreneurial is the firm's ability to recognize changes in market expectations. We argue that as a firm grows, it acquires new resources and new knowledge of how to use those resources. These new resource combinations increase its ability to recognize changes in market expectations-its adaptive capability. This capability uncovers new entrepreneurial opportunities for value creation. To capture this potential value, firms expand their entrepreneurial orientation.

Research Summary Delineating between conservative and entrepreneurial firms to discern the causes, consequences, and benefits of entrepreneurial behavior is a key conversation in strategic entrepreneurship research. We introduce to this conversation a new construct, Strategic Entrepreneurship Behaviors, which we argue provides several theoretical and practical benefits to scholars exploring strategic entrepreneurship phenomenon. We develop and validate a measurement model for the Strategic Entrepreneurship Behaviors construct using a three‐study design in Japan and in the United States. To facilitate reproducibility and replication of our results, we posted all data, R code, and Supporting Information on the Open Science Framework website available at https://osf.io/rqw5u/. Managerial Summary The driving question in strategic entrepreneurship research is the impact of an organization's entrepreneurial activity on its performance. Answering this and related questions requires careful measurement of entrepreneurial activity. Existing measures and scales served the field well, but to answer questions establishing causal relationships, we need new constructs and measures robust to causal research designs. We introduce a new construct and scale, Strategic Entrepreneurial Behaviors, to capture the firm's exploitation of new product‐market opportunities through the intended commercialization of its product innovations. We hope this new measure for a firm's entrepreneurial activity allows researchers to build more predictive theory, and to ask—and answer—new research questions that move the strategic entrepreneurship conversation forward.

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