Entrepreneurship in mature contexts

Entrepreneurship is a discipline that broadly covers different areas in that it is a pervasive phenomenon. In this paper we analyze the role of entrepreneurship in mature industries, where ever more often change is necessary for avoiding decline. First we underline how mature industries are embedded with a potential renewed role for entrepreneurship, with the support of the life cycle model. Furthermore, in order to support the cross-analysis of entrepreneurship in mature industries, we will describe the resource-based view as a tool of measurement of entrepreneurial activity. The main objective is to capture the evolution of resources – linked to a successful leverage of internal capabilities – in industries that are unattractive. The choice of specific indicators (growth of sales, profitability, productivity and relative market pricing) aim to highlight specific traits common to three business cases analyzed in detail. In this perspective emerging businesses are endowed with entrepreneurial activity in order to survive in mature contexts. Specifically, these entrepreneurial firms show a high tension to growth, enjoy good reputation, achieve better productivity compared to that of the industry in which they compete and are particularly able to adopt innovative technologies.