Page 112 - Grow from Within Mastering Corporate Entrepreneurship and Innovation

Emerging Models of Corporate Entrepreneurship 99

cracks or receive insufficient funding to prove feasible. Clearly,
such an environment can be hard to sustain; consequently, the
Opportunist approach is not dependable for many companies
in the long term. In some companies, an ad hoc innovation cul-
ture flows down from the very top and dissipates when a new
CEO comes in. For other companies, their success in corporate
entrepreneurship leads them to grow to a size where informal
innovation management does not continue to work as well as
it did when the company was smaller. Likewise, in some indus-
tries, the nature of competition may change from a locally
dominated cluster to a globalized network in which an infor-
mal culture of innovation does not work reliably.
When organizations get serious about organic growth, exec-
utives realize that they need more than a diffused, ad hoc
approach. For instance, Zimmer has instituted more formalized
development practices for bringing new businesses to market,
partly in response to the increasingly global nature of its busi-
ness. It has instituted practices to synchronize the development
of new technologies with the new product development projects
in the company’s development pipeline, so that there is a better
flow of new technologies into new products and potentially new
businesses. Scrutiny of the entire medical devices industry by
the U.S. Department of Justice may make it difficult to maintain
some of the informal communication and coordination practices
that characterized industry competition in the past, which could
lead to further changes in how Zimmer competes. As a result,
while still fundamentally following the Opportunist Model, the
company has begun to evolve beyond it.

The Enabler Model

When the Opportunist Model works, it does so because the
corporate leadership culture values innovative new business