Page 126 - Grow from Within Mastering Corporate Entrepreneurship and Innovation

Emerging Models of Corporate Entrepreneurship 113

The next stage of the MDI program is aimed at conceptual-
izing new business ideas that are consistent with the strategic
framing. A four-day “business builder” session helps people
from both inside and outside DuPont generate and prioritize
different business concepts. Teams will then typically spend
between four and eight weeks developing a detailed business
plan, including a 180-day contract with senior management to
address major uncertainties of any concepts that are deemed
promising enough to justify such an effort. The process brings
to the surface not only opportunities to innovate business sys-
tem components but also gaps in the company’s existing capa-
bilities. The team and a facilitator from the MDI program will
present the plan to business unit leadership for approval and
next-stage funding.
If the project is funded, the team moves into the concept
validation phase. Unlike initial business conception, which
is typically qualitative and somewhat abstract, concept val-
idation is much more data-driven. Here, teams pursue their
180-day contract with senior management, managing busi-
ness risk by spending minimal resources in the early phases
to test uncertainties and validate or invalidate their initial
insights in real market environments. A concept can be can-
celed at any point in the process; however, most often the
process brings uncertainties to the surface and tests hypothe-
ses in ways that help new business design teams evolve the
concept for successful commercialization during the Execute
phase. As the concept matures, MDI applies a process
known as Discovery-Driven Planning, a rigorous approach
to tying uncertainty resolution to actions and learning objec-
tives described by Rita Gunther McGrath and Ian MacMil-
lan in a 1995 Harvard Business Review article.
The core of the MDI program had only about half a dozen
full-time employees, and becoming part of that group was a