Page 125 - Grow from Within Mastering Corporate Entrepreneurship and Innovation

112 grow from within

Cooper and two DuPont staffers sought out academic and
other insights into how to drive new business development. At
the time, there was not much of a literature, as DuPont was
among the first companies to think seriously about corporate
entrepreneurship as a driver of organic growth. The company
needed to determine what would be the practices and princi-
ples of a corporate-level effort that would work for DuPont.
Cooper partnered with a range of thought leaders, including
Ian MacMillan, Rita Gunther McGrath, and Adrian Slywotzky,
to design a high-level program concept incorporating the lat-
est insights and procedures for generating and building new
businesses.
After incorporating lessons learned from a pilot program,
the ultimate result was the DuPont Market-Driven Innovation
(MDI) initiative. MDI is a five-stage process. Underlying each
of the phases is a comprehensive set of methodologies and
frameworks that supports the teams and provides consistency
and rigor to the process. The essential first stage is Leadership
Framing, during which the MDI team works with business unit
leadership to define the core mission, growth domain, and
decision criteria for opportunities that they are willing to fund.
The core mission refers to the maximum value proposition for
customers and society, a lofty definition that allows the team
to cast a broad but relevant net. The growth criteria define the
factors that the leadership will use to select opportunities. The
growth domains articulate areas for potential growth that sat-
isfy the mission and rate well against the growth criteria. These
sessions don’t define the new business concept, but they make
it clear to everyone where the business unit is willing to play,
and under what conditions. “We wouldn’t even begin a proj-
ect without top business unit leadership spending an intense
two days with us developing and articulating the strategic
vision and operating boundaries,” says Cooper.