Page 164 - Grow from Within Mastering Corporate Entrepreneurship and Innovation

Which Model Is Right for You? 151

in coordinated efforts to build broad solutions, then a central
organization dedicated to filling in these so-called white spaces
may be valuable. This latter objective was part of the Baxter
CEO’s vision, hence the creation of the centralized corporate
innovation team and Non-Traditional Research and Innovation
(NTRI) group at Baxter.

Corporate Culture and History

A company that is considering a corporate entrepreneurship
effort but that does not have much of a history or culture of sup-
porting innovative thinking is likely to need a formal corporate
effort to overcome corporate inertia and drive new business
conceptualization and development. However, a company
teeming with entrepreneurial people may find that instituting
some Enabler processes is sufficient to make corporate entre-
preneurship thrive. In the Baxter case, the creation of a corpo-
rate entrepreneurship team followed separate efforts to build a
more innovative culture, but pursuing new business creation
just through Enabler-style processes was not sufficient. Baxter’s
NTRI team evolved into a dedicated Producer organization that
creates entirely new growth platforms for the company.

Market Turbulence

A company whose core markets are turbulent will probably
need to experiment in many different directions in order to find
promising new business models. Dedicated resources can help
by facilitating fast decision making and action. A decentralized
approach in the early stages can help bring in ideas from all
areas of the company. For Baxter, whose markets were relatively
stable, a decentralized approach could have been adopted if the
corporate objective had been to revitalize business units, as