Page 183 - Grow from Within Mastering Corporate Entrepreneurship and Innovation

168 grow from within

growth targets of the overall corporation, and hence more
opportunities look attractive (and there are more
managers looking for such opportunities).
• A joint project by the Industrial Research Institute (IRI)
and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) delved into the
management competencies required for large, established
firms to conceive, refine, and launch a Radical Innovation
(2000). To overcome the disincentives that business units
face in scaling innovative projects and finding appropriate
mainstream business models, they suggest that companies
form a transition team, assess transition readiness,
develop a detailed transition plan, identify transition
senior management champions, establish a transition
oversight board, provide transition funding and
commitment, and define the business model to lay the
groundwork for a big market.
• The same types of suggestions appear in David Garvin
and Lynne Levesque’s overview article in a 2006 Harvard
Business Review, “Meeting the Challenges of Corporate
Entrepreneurship.” One-third of the “balancing acts” that
firms face concern integrating field-proven new business
concepts into the corporate core. They advocate that
corporate entrepreneurship projects that are at the point of
scaling begin to share operational responsibilities with an
existing business, mixing in managers and building
“dotted- and solid-line reporting relationships,” while
formulating specific criteria for fully integrating the new
business into the existing business.
•In Fast Second (2005), Constantinos Markides and Paul
Geroski recommend that large firms focus on scaling up
(consolidating) strategically selected segments of emerging
markets, rather than investing significant amounts of R&D
in trying to create emerging technologies. This should be