Page 136 - Grow from Within Mastering Corporate Entrepreneurship and Innovation

Emerging Models of Corporate Entrepreneurship 123

significant influence over business unit funding. Setting up a
separate, empowered organization—which we classify broadly
as the Producer Model—is a common suggestion in the current
corporate innovation literature. The Producer Model aims to
protect emerging projects from turf battles, to encourage cross-
unit collaboration, to build potentially disruptive businesses,
and to create pathways for executives to pursue careers out-
side their business units. Unlike the separate organizations of
the 1970s and 1980s, however, current implementations are
conscious of the difficulties that such separated organizations
have traditionally had in bringing proven new businesses back
into the mainstream company. They are more than privileged
versions of central R&D. Modern Producer organizations are
closely tied to corporate leadership and strategy, and they pro-
vide a great deal of support for the commercialization, transi-
tion, and scaling of new businesses.

Cargill: Emerging Business Accelerator

Cargill, the privately held, $75 billion global agriculture prod-
ucts and services company, established its Emerging Business
Accelerator (EBA) in 2001 to pursue corporate entrepreneur-
ship. EBA is not about innovation, per se. Cargill has a chief
innovation officer organization, embedded within Product
Development, that focuses on developing ideas for innovation
that can potentially be applied in other parts of the company.
Cargill made a conscious decision to separate this innovation
promotion function, which focuses on tools, processes, and
other enhancements to existing businesses, from EBA, which is
about building new businesses. As David Patchen, the group’s
founder and managing director, recalls, “Prior to the EBA,
we lacked a clearly defined process for pursuing opportunities
that fell outside of the scope of existing business units and func-