The effect of corporate entrepreneurship on the financial results of enterprises: The case of the BIST manufacturing sector

While organizations continue to operate for profit, they strive to gain a competitive advantage in the environment surrounding them and in the face of many uncertainties. Corporate entrepreneurship, one of the phenomena that will enable these efforts to be realized toward a specific performance goal, has been widely studied in the literature for at least forty years. Corporate entrepreneurship is a vital tool for creating a sustainable competitive advantage by identifying and evaluating opportunities, creating new ideas, business models, and growth prospects, and improving the efficiency and growth of the firm. Just as individual entrepreneurship is accepted as the engine of the economy, corporate entrepreneurship is recommended because of theoretical and empirical research with the idea that it will benefit organizations in many ways. However, only some of these studies have objectively evaluated the impact of corporate entrepreneurship on financial results. In this framework, this study examines the impact of corporate entrepreneurship activities on the financial results of 192 manufacturing enterprises listed on the BIST, which are considered corporate entrepreneurs, and their differences in financial results with non-corporate entrepreneurs in a longitudinal design for the period covering the years 2011-2020. According to the research results, the financial performance of corporate entrepreneur enterprises is positively and significantly different from that of non-entrepreneur enterprises. According to these results, the return on equity of corporate entrepreneurs is higher than that of non-corporate entrepreneurs in the three, five, and nine-year periods. However, there is no significant difference between the average return on equity of enterprises that make R&D expenditures and those that do not make R&D expenditures in the short, medium, and long term. On the other hand, although corporate entrepreneurship has a positive and significant effect on enterprises' return on equity, the enterprise's technology level does not play a significant role in this relationship.