Page 135 - Grow from Within Mastering Corporate Entrepreneurship and Innovation

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ground for a company and technology that are on the brink of
achieving market success. But the negotiations can be delicate,
involving such things as intellectual property protection and
ownership. On the other hand, the large company can be more
than just a major customer. It can often help to develop a mar-
ket by bringing together several component part suppliers to
achieve a system solution.
A fundamental challenge for Advocate organizations is to
maintain a balance between explorations of longer-term, game-
changing concepts and producing tangible near-term results.
It takes time to fill the pipeline, and individual projects may
have a long gestation period.
Another challenge is to remain current, not only in under-
standing the external ecosystem but also in employing leading-
edge methods and practices in corporate entrepreneurship. Good
Advocate teams are introspective and regularly seek outside
process concepts and advice. DuPont’s Advocate group has
changed its basic operating motif three times since 1999. In 2006,
BP’s CTO group was challenged by a corporate advisory group
not to rest on its laurels. So it applied to itself the same approach
that it used for concept development: going out to its network
for advice and leading-edge thinking on the process of being an
Advocate organization. Business Unit Partnering was one of the
new approaches that came out of these investigations, as well as
the addition of modern, Internet-mediated methods for building
external networks of concept developers and solutions providers,
such as NineSigma.Com, InnoCentive.Com, and yet2.com.

The Producer Model
A few companies, such as Cargill, Cisco, and IBM, pursue cor-
porate entrepreneurship by establishing and supporting for-
mal organizations with significant dedicated funds or