Page 113 - Grow from Within Mastering Corporate Entrepreneurship and Innovation

100 grow from within

creation and devotes time and energy to it. Therefore, a logical
step for companies that are seeking to encourage corporate
entrepreneurship is to create mechanisms for supporting
employees and teams in conceiving new businesses and then
systematically bringing these businesses to the attention of top
management. This is the essence of the Enabler Model.
The basic premise of the Enabler Model is that employees
across an organization will be willing and able to develop new
business concepts if they are given adequate support and atten-
tion to lead them to believe that there is a good chance of the
new business becoming real. Dedicating resources enables such
teams to pursue opportunities largely on their own. Because
there is no formal organizational ownership of such efforts,
successful experiments or demonstrations depend on top man-
agement support if they are to be turned into new businesses.
In this way, the Enabler Model is similar to the Opportunist
Model, except that the early stages of new business conception
are explicitly supported, encouraged, and often strategically
channeled, with a promise of serious management attention to
those concepts that look promising.
In rarer but very interesting cases, Enabler processes are
employed as part of a broader, long-term plan to change the
culture of an organization, that is, to transform a company
without a strong tradition of innovation into one in which
innovation and corporate entrepreneurship are encouraged
and facilitated broadly throughout the organization. As noted
in Chapter 1, undertaking broad cultural change requires a
substantial and consistent commitment of top leadership,
along with concomitant changes in many corporate manage-
ment processes, from new product development processes to
recruiting and human resources management. In this section,
we will provide both an example of an inherently innovative
organization that employs Enabler processes in order to