Entrepreneurship as a renewal in mature industries

Entrepreneurship broadly covers different areas because it is a pervasive phenomenon. We here analyze the role of entrepreneurship in mature industries, where strategic change may be necessary for avoiding decline. Firstly, mature industries are embedded with a potential renewed role for entrepreneurship. Furthermore, the resource- based view may be employed as a tool of measurement of entrepreneurial activity in mature industries. The objective of this paper is to capture the evolution of resources – linked to a successful leverage of internal capabilities –in industries that are unattractive. The choice of specific indicators will highlight specific traits common to three cases of emerging business analyzed in detail. These businesses are endowed with entrepreneurial resources and revive in mature contexts. Specifically, these firms showed a high tension to growth, enjoyed good reputation, achieved better productivity compared to that of the industry in which they compete and were particularly able to adopt innovative technologies.