Page 114 - Grow from Within Mastering Corporate Entrepreneurship and Innovation

Emerging Models of Corporate Entrepreneurship 101

enhance corporate entrepreneurship (Google) and a company
without a tradition of innovation that employed such processes
as part of a long-term plan to change the corporate culture
(Whirlpool), with both core innovation and corporate entre-
preneurship as objectives.

Google: An Ecosystem of Entrepreneurs

Google is the poster child for the Enabler Model. Google’s
innovations in Internet search and advertising have made its
Web site a top Internet destination and its brand one of the
most recognized in the world. Google maintains the world’s
largest online index of Web sites and other content. Google
generates revenue by delivering targeted, online advertising
and by licensing its advertising program to thousands of third-
party Web sites. Founded in 1998 by Larry Page and Sergey
Brin, building on three years of research as computer science
Ph.D. candidates at Stanford University, the company has
grown to more than 20,000 employees as of this writing. Rev-
enues have grown from under $500,000 in 2002 to almost $22
billion in 2008.
Despite its tremendous growth and significant size today,
Google maintains the open and freewheeling stance of a much
smaller company. Keval Desai, a Google program manager,
describes his company in the following way: “We’re really an
internal ecosystem of entrepreneurs . . . sort of like the [Silicon]
Valley ecosystem but inside one company.” At Google, employ-
ees are allowed to spend 20 percent of their time promoting
their ideas to colleagues, assembling teams, exploring con-
cepts, and building prototypes. Project groups form on the fly,
based on requirements that are defined by the teams them-
selves. As a result, a project’s initial success depends on the
entrepreneurial capabilities of the project champion or cham-