Page 151 - Grow from Within Mastering Corporate Entrepreneurship and Innovation

138 grow from within

preneurship happen, the newly anointed corporate entrepre-
neurship team acquires a mission that is related in some way to
generating new paths to growth or enhancing the company’s
overall innovation effectiveness.
Senior leadership should be lauded for recognizing the
importance of innovation and corporate entrepreneurship for
the company’s long-term health. Unfortunately, without more
specific direction, the objectives of corporate entrepreneurship
teams often become unwieldy and unclear. When they have
unclear objectives, teams tend to overextend their troops, wag-
ing too many simultaneous battles. Others in the company, some
of whom must become the innovators’ allies, end up being
unsure of exactly what this cost center is trying to accomplish.
For a corporate entrepreneurship effort to succeed, it must
be focused on important and relatively stable corporate objec-
tives. It is not enough to simply set a goal for revenue growth
or margin contribution attributable to corporate entrepreneur-
ship. Setting an “innovation aspiration” is important, as it
solidifies which bottom-line effects are needed and provides
guidance to those who are charged with developing specific
structures and processes. It can be a motivating metric that
helps the company determine how it will eventually allocate
corporate entrepreneurship funding between incremental and
breakthrough projects. But that is not enough on its own.
In fact, corporate objectives must be clearly defined so that
different parts of the corporation understand their role in the
process and can pull together the people, resources, and tools
necessary to accomplish these objectives. As you might imag-
ine, there can be considerable negotiation over corporate entre-
preneurship roles and missions, particularly the boundaries
between corporate entrepreneurship and the existing new
product development functions and new business develop-
ment organizations. There may also be significant pushback