Page 109 - Grow from Within Mastering Corporate Entrepreneurship and Innovation

96 grow from within

corporation (these are the mavericks we wrote about in Chap-
ter 1). Small, entrepreneurial companies are Opportunists by
their very nature. They are typically built around visionary
champions and have leadership whose primary job is turning
dreams into reality. Yet in large, established companies, encour-
aging visionaries and allocating sufficient management atten-
tion to these individuals is rare.

Zimmer: An Opportunist Model That Has Worked

There are some organizations in which innovative new busi-
ness ideas may come from anywhere in the company, and
there’s a good chance that promising ones will get support and
attention from top executives. Consider Zimmer, a medical
device company founded in 1927 and headquartered in War-
saw, Indiana. Zimmer focuses on the design, development,
manufacture, and marketing of reconstructive and spinal
implants and trauma and related orthopedic surgical products.
Zimmer has more than 8,500 employees in more than two
dozen countries, with 2008 sales of about $4.1 billion. From
1972 to 2001, Zimmer was owned by Bristol Myers Squibb. It
was spun off in August 2001, and Ray Elliott, president of the
Zimmer subsidiary from 1997 to 2001, was named CEO of the
independent company. (David C. Dvorak was appointed pres-
ident and CEO of Zimmer on May 1, 2007.)
While Zimmer had been quite innovative during its time as
a subsidiary, it began to flourish as an independent (but still
large) company. Zimmer has R&D organizations that under-
take new product development, but it has no formal organiza-
tion or dedicated resources for corporate entrepreneurship. In
the medical device field, innovative new business ideas often
come from users. For instance, in 1997, trauma surgeon Dana
Mears began experimenting with ideas for minimally invasive