Page 143 - Grow from Within Mastering Corporate Entrepreneurship and Innovation

130 grow from within

To build integrated concepts, you need entrepreneurs. In
many, if not most, companies, capable entrepreneurial project
leaders—what DuPont came to call Business Builders—are a
rare breed. Cisco was fortunate, however. EMTG looked around
the corporation and discovered that more than half of the entre-
preneurs in the start-up companies it had acquired over the past
10 years were still working at Cisco. When these entrepreneurs
found out what EMTG was doing, they came knocking.
A typical project team will have a general manager, an engi-
neering lead, a product development person, and a business
development person. If the concept looks promising after initial
investigations, it graduates to being a business, and it hires its
own engineers. By the time the team has a product, there may
be 50 or so people involved. In early market testing of the new
product or system, EMTG is disciplined about selecting its cus-
tomers. Early customers are viewed as development partners,
not just potential sources of future revenue. Thus, they need to
be chosen carefully to generate as much relevant market learn-
ing as possible. It often makes sense to select those customers
whose problems are most compelling, which are not necessar-
ily the same customers as those in the largest projected market
segment. The most important thing not to do is to try to address
all the potential markets at once. If you try to please everybody
with your version 1.0 product, you will get bogged down.
If things are still looking good in market tests, then about six
months before a full market launch, EMTG forms a “tiger
team” of people from manufacturing, finance, service, sales,
and other divisions to work out all the dependencies. These
people meet every week to determine the go-to-market strat-
egy. This is also the time when organizational conflicts are
resolved, so that the transition from a proven technology and
market into a scaling business does not falter, as is often the
case during this critical and difficult transition.