Page 116 - Grow from Within Mastering Corporate Entrepreneurship and Innovation

Emerging Models of Corporate Entrepreneurship 103

space, Google top executives will often want to maintain closer
involvement in what Google is doing.
At any given time, Google is typically supporting more than
100 new business concepts in various stages of development, and
information about the projects is maintained in a central, search-
able database. Managers estimate that approximately 70 percent
of the projects support the company’s core business in some fash-
ion, 20 percent represent emerging business ideas, and 10 percent
are pursuing speculative experiments. In the early stages, an
experimental Web page will typically be launched at a special
labs.google.com Web site. Later, the team may set up its own
page, for example, maps.google.com. For business concepts
related to existing Google offerings, the VP under whose purview
the concept falls will keep track of all research activity worldwide
and seek to provide some strategic coherence to the overall cor-
porate effort. If successful, a project or set of projects may be
brought together to become, in effect, its own division. A special
committee determines the very few businesses that may have a
link on Google’s primary consumer Web page, www.google.com.
If a project succeeds, team members can receive substantial
bonuses (called Founders’ Awards), sometimes amounting to
millions of dollars. These bonuses do not match what entre-
preneurs might make if they were successful on their own, but
most employees see the benefits of remaining within Google—
in particular, a much higher probability of success. Many
Google managers have experience on the “outside” and thus
relish the intense yet supportive and trusting atmosphere that
Google offers.

Whirlpool: Building an Innovation Culture

Google’s entrepreneurial culture, dynamic market, and extra -
ordinary access to capital make the company’s success difficult