Page 133 - Grow from Within Mastering Corporate Entrepreneurship and Innovation

120 grow from within

their most pressing challenges. In other words, “needs pull”
from business units has become a more explicit focus (rather
than “pushing” emerging technologies at business unit prob-
lems). Business Unit Partnering begins with each CTO senior
staff member connecting with carefully selected business units,
with the goal of developing a detailed understanding of their
challenges. Using connections within the business units devel-
oped during previous engagements, the CTO office works with
staff members to identify pressing challenges, highlighting past
technology successes and seeding the discussion with prelim-
inary ideas for innovative, nontraditional digital solutions.
Next, Daru and key CTO team members meet with the busi-
ness unit leader and his or her leadership team to define the
highest-priority performance and operational problems facing
their business unit.
Each business unit engagement presents its own challenges.
With some, it’s budget allocation. With others, it’s focus and
follow-through. The higher level of visibility puts additional
pressure on the CTO office to maintain its reputation for deliv-
ering solid business value. The team has also discovered that
the timing and risk tolerance for the adoption of even proven
technologies differ among business units. The CTO office has
begun to keep track of different business units’ timing for a bet-
ter sense of when and how to feed prospects to new business
unit partners.
This transition to a more needs-oriented or market-focused
perspective—rather than a technology or product/offering
focus—is characteristic of many of the structured corporate
entrepreneurship efforts that we’ve observed. Staying focused
on business adoption, rather than technical impressiveness, is
an important discipline. It is essential to the Advocate Model,
where a primary concern is finding which avenues of adoption
within a business unit will have the best chance of working.