Vanguards and ventures: Projects as vehicles for corporate entrepreneurship

The concept of vanguard project refers to a first-of-its-kind project, initiated to enable a firm to diversify into a new market or technology based on an existing market and client base. We show that the concept can be broadened by engaging with the corporate entrepreneurship literature, which demonstrates that many entrepreneurial projects for diversification are developed in areas where there is no existing client and a market has to be created. The paper makes the unconventional connection between the literature on project business, and studies of entrepreneurship using two examples from the UK energy sector to illustrate how firms develop vanguard projects where there is no existing client. In both cases, the firms used vanguard projects to venture into new technologies or markets, to generate new knowledge and experience rather than to optimise an existing activity. However, the learning from a vanguard project may not always lead to a general scaling up or rolling out process across a number of new similar projects through applying the lessons learned in the new venture. Future research on vanguard projects should embrace both the responses to existing client needs and internally generated initiatives to create entirely new markets.