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Corporate Entrepreneurship, Strategy Formulation, and the Performance of the Nigerian Manufacturing Sector

Corporate entrepreneurship is a process that encourages formulating and implementing new ideas, taking risks, and creating new ideas to start new businesses. It is associated with innovation, which results in entrepreneur wealth and adds value for an organisation and the customers that buy the products. The Nigerian manufacturing sector has been underperforming in the past decade with numerous firms in the sector operating at less than 30% of initially installed capacity. Despite various industrial transformation programmes initiated by the successive governments to boost manufacturing outputs, most firms in this sector do not seem to have made any significant progress in response. Reasons for this underperformance is arguably due to the misalignment between ‘externally-driven’ policies and the ‘internal processes’ within the individual firms of various sizes. To explore and unravel the undercurrents impelling the seeming strategy- environment misalignment, this study takes a recourse to the strategic management literature. It draws from the intersectionality of strategy-environment congruence and the attendant moderating effect on performance. In order to drill down to conceptual specifics, it builds on the 3Cs framework (competence, commitment and co-ordination) initially propounded by Jha and Iyer (2007). Based on a sample of 32 manufacturing firms and leaning on the qualitative methodological approach (using interpretative phenomenological analysis), the study sought to gain situated, contextual, insights into the perceptions of the phenomenon as demonstrable in the strategic configuration. It interrogated respective processes of strategy formulation and implementation in the degree to which they are moderated by the contending environmental variables and the cumulative impact on corporate performance. This is the level of analysis at which corporate entrepreneurship behaviour, in terms of both antecedents and consequences, profoundly manifests itself; mirroring management behaviour, sensitivity and predilections towards environmental scanning capabilities. The sample of firms was drawn from firms of varying sizes in four geopolitical zones of Nigeria – South West, South East, South, and North Central. Results indicate profound ambivalences in the nature of the operating environment and the signals emitted there from which, in turn, truncates entrepreneurial behaviours of firms. Essentially, negative perceptions of the environment militated against strategic coherence, thus adversely impacting corporate performances. Essentially, the eclectic 3Cs paradigm holds strong explanatory as well as diagnostic force in explicating the setbacks of the Nigerian manufacturing sector. The analytical prism is a novelty and offers tremendous latitude for sketching out appropriate turnaround intervention strategies.