Page 122 - Grow from Within Mastering Corporate Entrepreneurship and Innovation

Emerging Models of Corporate Entrepreneurship 109

concepts into real businesses. Without sufficient support from
senior management, promising concepts can end up as casu-
alties of conflicts with established businesses. If senior execu-
tives are not committed to using Enabler processes to
investigate and develop truly new businesses, then funding
provided for projects can degenerate into “bowling for dol-
lars”—simply an alternative source of funds for ordinary busi-
ness unit projects or for projects that the company is not
particularly serious about. In the most evolved versions of the
Enabler Model, companies provide clear criteria for selecting
which opportunities to pursue, guidelines for applying for
funding, decision-making transparency, and, perhaps above
all, well-defined engagement from senior management.
Whirlpool was particularly sensitive to the “bowling for dol-
lars” problem. What qualified as an innovative project for the
purposes of receiving an allocation from the capital budget—
recall there was a fixed percentage set aside for innovative
pro jects—was carefully defined and monitored.
The selection criteria for project funding can serve as an
important expression of corporate strategic intent. In some
cases, there may be significant benefits to mine from cross-divi-
sional collaboration. In other cases, a company may want to
encourage innovation in the spaces between businesses or by
taking divisional capabilities into entirely new markets. Pro-
viding such strategic direction may deter corporate entrepre-
neurship in certain business dimensions, but if it is well
designed, it should encourage a critical mass of effort in those
areas that are deemed most important to the company’s future.
The importance of focusing innovation efforts is suggested by
a 2007 McKinsey Global Survey of top managers (“How Com-
panies Approach Innovation”), which found it to be the most
common type of engagement leaders have in the innovation
processes of their company (more common than, for instance,