Page 138 - Grow from Within Mastering Corporate Entrepreneurship and Innovation

Emerging Models of Corporate Entrepreneurship 125

• To select, staff, fund, and monitor—but not operate—a
portfolio of new businesses (EBA is not expected to act as
a project manager)
• To graduate successful businesses into the world of Cargill

For instance, when Cargill’s deicing business unit identified
a novel deicing technology, the group realized that it might not
be well suited to develop and commercialize the innovation.
The technology—an epoxy overlay that inhibits ice formation—
was going be a high-end product that would be sold to road
builders worldwide for critical applications such as bridges. But
Cargill’s deicing business unit primarily sells commodity prod-
ucts to Department of Transportation agencies in North Amer-
ica. So the new technology was transferred to the Emerging
Business Accelerator, which brought the offering to market.
Successes such as this have helped the Emerging Business
Accelerator achieve its goal of being a global clearinghouse for
new concepts and value propositions across Cargill. The group
maintains a Web site for people to submit ideas, from both
inside and outside the company. The project selection process
generally proceeds as follows:

• Origination. EBA asks four basic questions in the early
stages of a business concept: (1) What is the idea? (2) What
is the value to the customer? (3) What is the value to
Cargill? (4) What are the points of differentiation and the
competitive advantage?
• Preliminary due diligence (15 days). This involves an initial
market assessment of the broad financial parameters of
the marketplace. Is it a growth market? What is the
competitive landscape? This is not an assessment of the
economics of the new business concept, as this would be
premature and could suck the life out of it too early.