Page 181 - Grow from Within Mastering Corporate Entrepreneurship and Innovation

166 grow from within

“back end,” that is, at the point of scaling field-proven new
business concepts and making the transition into self-sustain-
ing businesses. In other words, the corporate entrepreneurship
bottleneck today is no longer coming up with ideas or devel-
oping new concepts, but rather scaling in the marketplace and
finding an organizational home for the business within the
company.
Today’s transition and scaling challenges can be traced back
to the changes in R&D management practices discussed briefly
in Chapter 1, where heavy investments in laboratories gave
way to research networks because of problems in commercial-
izing the outputs of separated laboratories. (See Appendix B
for a fuller history of corporate entrepreneurship.) Some of the
problems are fundamental: in many companies, corporate
entrepreneurship projects outgrow their incubators but don’t
produce sufficient revenues to garner the attention of business
units preoccupied with meeting this quarter’s numbers. Some
of the problems are firm-specific: in one company we’ve stud-
ied, profitable new businesses run into trouble when the busi-
ness units receiving them impose their particular quality and
product development standards retroactively.
Because transition and scaling has only recently been iden-
tified as a specific issue, it’s useful to briefly review recent writ-
ings. As is often the case in a newly emerging literature, each
author offered a different framework. Nevertheless, certain
management principles for transition and scaling success may
be gleaned.

• Geoffrey Moore’s landmark 1991 book Crossing the Chasm
pointed out that technology companies often fail because
they do not understand that mainstream customers, unlike
early adopters, will require significant support if they are
to adopt an offering that requires users to change their