Information and communication technologies (ICT)-based innovations and applications have become major drivers of enhanced organizational performance, economic growth, and social change. However, although the body of research that is pertinent to this area has substantially grown, the importance of complementary factors such as corporate entrepreneurship in enhancing the impact of technological innovation on organizational performance has yet to be addressed. This paper develops and tests a framework that depicts and examines the nature of the relationship between ICT-adoption/use and organizational performance in the Lebanese market, taking into consideration the impact that corporate entrepreneurship may have on this relationship. PLS is used to test the proposed relationships along with the significance of the mediation effect of corporate entrepreneurship. A multigroup analysis is also deployed to examine the impact of ICT-use level on the model. The proposed model is proven to be fit, the hypotheses are supported, and the implications are discussed.

Introduction

Over the past three decades, the research has shown that organizations initiate corporate entrepreneurship to add to their body of knowledge to facilitate increased revenues (Mcgrath, Venkataraman, & MacMillan, 1994), improved profitability (Zahra, 1993), enhanced competitiveness (Kuratko, Covin, & Garrett, 2009), and innovativeness (Ferreira et al., 2015) as an important potential growth driver (Burgelman & Doz, 2013; Morris, Kuratko, & Covin, 2011; Soriano & Huarng, 2013). This warrants a deeper understanding of corporate entrepreneurship in organizational settings, especially the role it plays in enabling ICT and innovation to be well integrated into an organization’s resources and strategies and consequently drive organizational performance to higher levels. The rapidly changing business environment has led to increased reliance on ICTs to attain and maintain competitiveness, improve profitability, and succeed in today’s dynamic market (Shamsuzzoha et al., 2012; Stanimirovic, 2015). This has been a driver of innovationrelated activities, all of which tend to be technology-based (Siegel, 2011) and are designed to obtain better efficiency and higher performance (Consoli, 2005; Ferreira et al., 2015; Igun, 2014). However, despite the wide adoption of ICT by organizations in various sectors, several survey reports have found that many projects fail. In 2012, Gartner reported that fewer than 30% of information systems projects such as Business Intelligence meet their business objectives (Saran, 2012) and that 55 to 75% of enterprise resource planning (ERP) projects encounter failure in meeting their intended objectives, with 74.1% of them exceeding costs and 50% not realizing enough benefits (Jacobs, 2012). More recently, according to a study by KPMG, 70% of businesses suffered project failures during 2014, and 50% failed to achieve their intended goals (Amankwah-Amoah, 2016; Erel, 2014). The above outcomes drive us to question the proper use of the adopted ICT in organizations. According to Kusumaningtyasa and Suwartob (2015) ICT adoption is defined as the “willingness to take the new innovation related to computer and internet”. In fact, the usage of ICT is defined by Blurton (2002) as the “diverse set of technological tools and resources used to communicate and to create, disseminate, store, and manage information”. Accordingly, Manochehri, Al-Esmail, and Ashrafi (2012) state that to benefit from ICT adoption, organizations should provide needed infrastructure and hire skilled ICT personnel. In other words, the necessary means to make effective use of the adopted ICT should be available for it to contribute positively to organizational performance. The above suggestions draw attention to the importance of having certain complementary factors in an organization to enable better use of ICT and accordingly reaping its benefits towards creating innovative business opportunities and achieving competitive advantage.