Corporate Entrepreneurship Managers' Project Terminations: Integrating Portfolio-Level, Individual-Level, and Firm-Level Effects

Corporate entrepreneurship managers often need to terminate projects to maximize their innovation portfolios' commercial prospects. Drawing on the attention-based view of the firm, we develop a model for how past project failure experience, the firm's growth rate, and their hierarchical level impact managers' attention to a project's fit with the corporate portfolio strategy and the balance of the portfolio when terminating projects. Using data from a conjoint study with 6,944 assessments of project terminations made by 217 managers, we provide insights into corporate entrepreneurship decision making and how portfolio-level, individual-level, and firm-level aspects interact in explaining project termination.