Page 118 - Grow from Within Mastering Corporate Entrepreneurship and Innovation

Emerging Models of Corporate Entrepreneurship 105

advantage in the “white goods” industry (i.e., large appliances)
by innovating fairly close to its core, focusing on new and com-
pelling solutions to overlooked or unarticulated customer
needs. He called this a Brand-Focused Value Creation Strategy.
In the parlance of the Innovation Radar in Chapter 2, we would
identify the focus as solutions, customer experience, and brand.
Consistent with these points of emphasis, there would also be
an emphasis on creating new platforms.
In the highly competitive white goods industry, the key to
sustainable competitive advantage would be setting a new
pace of innovation for the industry. This is what drove
Whirlpool to undertake an ambitious program to embed inno-
vative thinking and participation throughout the company
rather than setting up a separate group charged with reinvig-
orating existing product lines or exploiting “white space”
opportunities in areas that fell between the market or customer
focus of existing business units. (We’ll consider corporate
entrepreneurship models that are appropriate for those objec-
tives shortly.) “Innovation will come from everywhere and
everyone, and when we are successful, every job at Whirlpool
will change,” Snyder quotes Whitwam as saying.
Whirlpool engaged in a wide variety of training programs
and instituted several new management processes in order to
transform itself. It created new processes for product develop-
ment, personnel evaluation, knowledge management, finan-
cial accounting, and, most important for our purposes,
resource allocation and project reviews. For early-stage fund-
ing, Whirlpool set up “seed funds.” Whitwam mandated that
Whirlpool’s business units and regional offices spend a certain
amount on supporting new concept development. He also
maintained his own corporate seed funds, which he would use
to fund worthy ideas that had been rejected by business units
or regional offices. (Interestingly, according to Snyder, the