Page 152 - Grow from Within Mastering Corporate Entrepreneurship and Innovation

Which Model Is Right for You? 139

from legal or compliance organizations. In making a change as
significant as pursuing corporate entrepreneurship, such inter-
nal political battles are inevitable.
So how do you engage in successful corporate entrepre-
neurship? It’s a multistage process. At the highest level, the
mandate for growth or transformation should be accompanied
by a vision that points the general direction. In the case of
DuPont, discussed in Chapter 3, CEO Chad Holliday wanted
to make a push for better top-line revenue growth, in addition
to the cost cutting that had sustained margins and returns for
the prior six years. His corporate planning group considered
DuPont’s strengths, its changing competitive context, and
state-of-the-art academic research to articulate a strategic
vision. That vision, captured by the phrase “beyond the mole-
cule,” described how DuPont could increase top-line growth
by adding services and knowledge value to its traditional bulk
chemicals business. This charge guided what became Knowl-
edge Intensive University, through which DuPont’s most sen-
ior leaders were informed of the new growth direction.
Knowledge Intensive University provided training and sup-
port to DuPont business units that considered this new growth
direction to be a valuable and useful way to grow their busi-
nesses in support of the CEO’s initiative. (Note: Holliday did
not mandate that business units must work with the Knowl-
edge Intensive Management team.) Over time, Knowledge
Intensive University evolved into the Market-Driven Innova-
tion process, which aimed to bring greater market awareness
and focus to emerging business opportunities. Market-Driven
Innovation processes have gained wide acceptance across
DuPont’s business units, its geographical service divisions, and
even central research and development.
BP Plc, the global oil giant, is another example of how a
top-level mandate combined with a strategic vision can guide