Entrepreneurial orientation – an overlooked theoretical concept for studying media firms

Current changes in the media industries not only provide a range of new business opportunities for entrepreneurial start-ups, they also force legacy media firms to engage in corporate entrepreneurship and (re-)develop their entrepreneurial orientation as part of their strategic renewal. In recent years, media entrepreneurship has emerged as an area of study within media business studies, but it still lacks theoretical anchoring. While in mainstream entrepreneurship research entrepreneurial orientation (EO) has developed into a highly prominent theoretical concept, it has been largely overlooked for the study of media firms to date. This paper introduces entrepreneurial orientation to media business studies. It characterizes EO’s different dimensions and reviews relevant studies, and then illustrates the dimensions of the EO concept by drawing on the case example of a European online publisher. The case shows how different dimensions of EO are at play in the media firm and how the relevance of these dimensions is not stable over time, but in constant flux. Such process perspective on EO is outlined as a major future research opportunity for media entrepreneurship studies.