Page 155 - Grow from Within Mastering Corporate Entrepreneurship and Innovation

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persuasive capabilities. They probably shouldn’t spend much
time in a lab, unless it’s a lab they’re trying to enhance.
Instead, they need to spend their time with business units,
functional managers, customers, and partners—all of the indi-
viduals and organizations that could affect the future success
or failure of their business unit “clients” and the corporate
entrepreneurship group as a whole. DuPont and BP, for
instance, structured their corporate entrepreneurship efforts
around this objective.
We’ve seen newly formed corporate entrepreneurship teams
decide to take on more than one of these objectives, and in
some cases all three of them. Sometimes teams take on this
monumental task with their eyes wide open, while other times
the initiatives simply multiply as a result of having creative,
eager people on the team or trying to accommodate the inter-
ests of multiple top executives. Simultaneously, the team
begins to search for new businesses, engage with business unit
leaders to revise existing businesses, hunt for new technologies
or product concepts, and employ academics and consultants
to advocate the value and importance of corporate entrepre-
neurship to people across the company. These are all noble
goals, but trying to accomplish too much at once could put
long-term success at risk.
One of the authors worked with a state-funded university
technology transfer organization to help diagnose what was
going wrong. The answer was simple: the leadership had built
a top-flight team of biotechnology experts who were capable
of identifying and evaluating biotechnology opportunities.
Unfortunately, the team’s role was to help the university’s
researchers commercialize technologies through licensing or
new business creation. Bench scientists, with few exceptions,
are not the right people to build businesses. Given the legal
support it received from the university’s lawyers, what the