Page 106 - Grow from Within Mastering Corporate Entrepreneurship and Innovation

Emerging Models of Corporate Entrepreneurship 93

ness development effort. Clearly, for large organizations, there
were challenges in new business creation that were not cap-
tured by the technology/market framework.
The answer seemed to be, in the famous words of Walt
Kelly’s Pogo Possum, “We have met the enemy, and he is us!”
In addition to overcoming technical challenges and market
foibles, bringing new businesses to fruition requires overcom-
ing the resistance engendered within the corporation. A new
business, by its nature, involves doing things differently. But
large corporations become large by focusing intensely on com-
petencies that make the existing businesses competitive. New
business development projects are competing for corporate
resources, but they do not fit with the existing businesses. Why
would a business unit take on the technical and market risks of
a new business when there are other, better-understood oppor-
tunities for growing the existing business? Why would it risk
not meeting this quarter’s revenue and profit targets by spend-
ing time and money on a promising but unproven project that
might not scale into a self-sustaining business for years? Why
not instead stick with the sustained incremental improvements
afforded by implementing such measures as statistical quality
management or customer satisfaction surveys?
This was largely the answer for large corporations during
the 1980s and early 1990s, as suggested at the beginning of
Chapter 1. (See Appendix B for a brief history of corporate
entrepreneurship.) However, a few pioneering companies real-
ized that, in addition to the useful and profitable efforts in
quality management and incremental new product innovation,
organic growth through new business creation could also be
an important contributor to corporate success. Indeed, as dis-
cussed in Chapter 2, they began to see innovation as funda-
mentally a new business design problem rather than just a new
product development problem. And they realized that in addi-