Page 105 - Grow from Within Mastering Corporate Entrepreneurship and Innovation

92 grow from within

value in the market to justify its often relatively high costs—
costs that were routinely underestimated.
In other words, to be successful, companies needed to
resolve market uncertainties as well as technical uncertainties.
In which markets would the new technology bring the great-
est added value? What do these markets really need, and what
would customers in those markets be willing to pay? Market
uncertainties such as these often proved to be more difficult to
resolve than the technical uncertainties that could be resolved
in the laboratory.
In extreme cases, a new business concept might disrupt a mar-
ket or be new to the world, making customer and market reac-
tions unpredictable. In photography, for instance, it was clear
that cameras using digital technology would eventually advance
to the point that their picture quality would be comparable with
(if not better than) that of standard film. That was predictable.
What was not predictable was that millions of people who had
never used a film camera would start to use digital cameras.
Digital cameras became a standard addition to cellular phones.
These were entirely new markets. A company working in digi-
tal camera technology would have had a very difficult time
anticipating and forecasting demand for such new applications.
Even in less extreme cases, where market needs and cus-
tomer demand could be reasonably forecast, large companies
continued to experience difficulties in moving innovative
developments to market. Researchers and observers of corpo-
rate entrepreneurship efforts recognized that technical and
market uncertainties alone did not capture the full breadth of
the new business creation problem in large organizations. The
new technology underlying an innovative product might be
proven and its intended marketplace correctly targeted, and
yet the project might still fail. Often the concepts did come to
fruition, but not within the company sponsoring the new busi-