The Locus of Corporate Entrepreneurship: Kirin Brewery's Diversification into Biopharmaceuticals

Abstract

The Kirin Brewery Company is a large, long-established, and successful firm in a traditional, “old economy” sector in Japan. Nevertheless, in the early 1980s it entered the “new economy” business of biopharmaceuticals, based on advances in scientific techniques at the time and prospects for the bio-technology industry in the future. This essay explains why Kirin entered this field and how it developed the necessary competences. The development of these new competences was in no small part owing to entrepreneurial alertness and opportunity recognition by individuals in various functions of the firm. As such, the case illustrates the presence in the large modern corporation of the individual entrepreneur, a figure whose existence and role is often downplayed or simply omitted in nominalist treatments of entrepreneurship, which depict innovation as a somewhat mechanistic endeavor, absent any element of entrepreneurial behavior.

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