The Influence of Training on Internal Corporate Venturing Behavior: Evidence from a Field Experiment

To encounter uncertainty effectively in corporate entrepreneurial activities, employees must proficiently learn. We position the lean startup framework as an effective foundation from which to foster employees’ entrepreneurial activity (EEA) in established firms and examine whether and why lean startup-based training (LST) exerts positive effects on EEA, highlighting mediating learning mechanisms. Using a pretest-posttest quasi-experiment with 276 employees from 12 organizations and an autoregressive mediation model, we reveal a significant effect of LST on lean startup knowledge, interrelationships among learning mechanisms, and a functional causal chain from LST via lean startup knowledge and entrepreneurial alertness to EEA.