Page 15 - Grow from Within Mastering Corporate Entrepreneurship and Innovation

2 grow from within

its way to oblivion.” In a world of increasingly global markets
and fluidity of technical and business talent, where competi-
tive threats come from unexpected directions, more and more
businesses are looking for new ways to grow.
Corporate entrepreneurship is a strategic answer to the chal-
lenge of organic growth. It is an essential component of a well-
balanced, long-term growth portfolio. The best corporate
entrepreneurship programs are partners with a company’s tra-
ditional innovation programs and new business development
efforts, such as research and development, corporate venture
capital, and acquisitions.
Corporate entrepreneurship is a vehicle for the innovative
opportunities that don’t fit neatly into your core businesses. Sev-
eral books have been written recently about disruptive or radi-
cal innovations. Breakthrough technologies or products usually
require a new business design if they are to reach their potential,
but they’re not the only opportunities that benefit from a corpo-
rate entrepreneurial approach. Sometimes what appears to be an
incremental innovation in an established line of business will
grow larger and faster if it is approached as a new business rather
than just an extension of business as usual. Corporate entrepre-
neurship requires innovating in dimensions of an established
enterprise that too often are insufficiently considered, such as the
customer experience, channel strategy, and value capture.
There are numerous examples of companies that have suc-
ceeded by taking modest product or process innovations and
rethinking their prevailing business models. In 2003, a top
Sony executive lamented to us, “The iPod should have been a
Sony product!” Indeed, Sony had the heritage, the brand, the
technology, the channels—everything. The company effec-
tively redefined the portable music space in 1979 with the Sony
Walkman, at a time when people were not accustomed to
thinking of a tape player that could not record. It was Apple’s