Page 140 - Grow from Within Mastering Corporate Entrepreneurship and Innovation

Emerging Models of Corporate Entrepreneurship 127

and 5 remain in the EBA portfolio. It employs many develop-
ment paths: greenfield investments, patent licensing, minority
investments tied to business development agreements, and
small acquisitions. It selects, staffs, and monitors—but does not
operate—new business opportunities. In essence, it manages
the process but not the ideas, which helps build trust and
encourages collaboration among stakeholders.

Cisco: Emerging Markets Technology Group

Beginning in 2005, Cisco executives investigated and contem-
plated several trends in information technology that suggested
that the company would need to become much more engaged
in learning about and exploiting new business opportunities, not
just continued innovation in its core markets. The locus of inno-
vation in the information technology industry was moving from
the enterprise space (e.g., e-business) to the consumer space.
Concurrently, just about everything seemed to be using Internet
protocols, so that anything that could be connected was becom-
ing connected. Also, the Internet was moving from text-based to
video-based applications. By 2007, the amount of traffic con-
sumed by consumers exceeded that consumed by businesses for
the first time, as a result of video. Five video sites in 2008 gen-
erated more traffic than the entire U.S. Internet in 2001, and all
of them had been created since 2004, within the past five years.
The rise of video provides an interesting window on future
information technology trends. Much of the video traffic today
is piracy. But this “subversive edge” is instructive, as it reflects
a real market need: people want the convenience of music and
video on demand. Every Internet-based service or content
provider is trying to stamp out the underlying peer-to-peer
protocols, but they just become more robust, more scalable, and
more bulletproof. But these same technologies could enable the