Page 120 - Grow from Within Mastering Corporate Entrepreneurship and Innovation

Emerging Models of Corporate Entrepreneurship 107

seeking cultural change can doom corporate entrepreneurship
efforts. A reviewer of the Whirlpool experience (quoted by Sny-
der) noted, “One way to think of Whirlpool Corporation would
be as an appliance company that is innovative. But a better
characterization might be that Whirlpool has become an inno-
vation center that makes appliances.” We’ve heard this before
from other companies. One told us that it wanted to become an
innovative company that makes furniture, as opposed to an
innovative furniture company. This is usually a mistake.
Indeed, we would argue that Whirlpool’s success is due pre-
cisely to the fact that it had a well-thought-out strategy that was
attuned to its deep knowledge of its core business. We are cur-
rently working with a company in the defense industry that is
interested in enhancing its corporate entrepreneurship per-
formance. While enhancing the innovation potential embedded
in its experienced workforce will be part of the corporate entre-
preneurship program, we are suggesting that culture change
not be announced as an explicit objective, but rather be done
quietly, beginning around the edges and then moving toward
the core slowly and organically. As noted in Chapter 1, trying
to make everybody innovative is usually not the right way for
companies in this position to proceed.
Even in Whirlpool’s case, evolution of its model toward a
greater focus on corporate entrepreneurship rather than other
forms of innovation may be warranted. To qualify as an inno-
vation project, an idea must be new to the world, not just new
to Whirlpool, and it must not be able to be copied by competi-
tors. Yet having changed the corporate culture in ways that per-
mit opportunistic innovation, there may be ways for Whirlpool
to leverage its brand in areas where competition exists, as well
as to profit from opportunities further out from its core. For
instance, Su Yong and Chen Xiaoping reported in Comprehen-
sive Research on Brands how Haier of China discovered an agri-