Page 17 - Grow from Within Mastering Corporate Entrepreneurship and Innovation

4 grow from within

the resulting bunch of ideas into new business designs, then
convert them into growing businesses. How many brain-
storming sessions have you and your colleagues attended
where nothing much happened after everyone returned to the
office? If good ideas are consistently ignored or seed funding
to investigate them is slow or insufficient, people become con-
ditioned to stop trying.
Even if concepts spend time in incubation, how often do
they languish there without being successfully scaled into a
meaningful new business? Or how often are they suffocated by
existing business units that are protecting their own turf or
killed because revenue or profit goals are applied prematurely?
We refer to this as the transition and scaling challenge, and it’s an
issue that corporate entrepreneurs and innovators across
industries must face. The real question is, what does it take to
build new businesses within your organization, not just invent
something novel, and take them to market?
This book provides frameworks and tools for the early stages
of new business design and advice on how to plan and lead an
ongoing corporate entrepreneurship program based on strate-
gic objectives and corporate context. Different corporate contexts
require different structures and processes. Each company will
set different goals for its corporate entrepreneurship initiatives
and for its innovation efforts more generally. Building the right
approaches starts with clearly understanding your objectives.
This is not just a book for internal venture leaders or bud-
ding corporate entrepreneurs. The approaches described for
winning at corporate entrepreneurship are often useful in plan-
ning and implementing other innovation and growth initia-
tives. Building truly new businesses within established
companies raises many issues that are similar to those raised
by enabling innovation more broadly. But new business cre-
ation often poses even more complex challenges that affect a