Page 146 - Grow from Within Mastering Corporate Entrepreneurship and Innovation

Emerging Models of Corporate Entrepreneurship 133

ducer Model organizations are generally run by senior leaders
who have mastered the art of internal corporate politics. This
quality makes Producer organizations vulnerable to poor suc-
cession planning. (The problem of the leadership of corporate
entrepreneurship organizations will be covered in Chapter 5.)
The four models of corporate entrepreneurship are the basic
archetypes from which companies can choose. In the next
chapter, we will provide guidance as to how to make that
choice, based on your organization’s strategic intent and cor-
porate context. Before that, however, it is important to empha-
size, as the examples in this section have shown, that there is
significant variability and customization involved in imple-
menting any one of the models. Furthermore, very large com-
panies may implement different models at different levels of
the corporation, or sometimes within the same organization.
IBM, for instance, maintains a Producer team called Emerging
Business Opportunities that, as mentioned in the introduction,
is generating over $15 billion per year in new revenues. Mean-
while, IBM’s Thinkplace and Innovation Jams encourage new
ideas and networking in the fashion of an Advocate Model.
Like an Enabler, IBM supports divisional processes for concept
development and experimentation, some of which transfer
projects to the Emerging Business Opportunities program for
full-scale development and scaling. And IBM is fortunate to
have a corporate culture that in many ways supports an
Opportunist Model. Distributed power bases enable corporate
entrepreneurs to find pockets of interest and resources across
the corporation without structured facilitation.

Summary

Chapter 3 cut through the maze of emerging innovation man-
agement practices to present four basic corporate entrepre-