Page 185 - Grow from Within Mastering Corporate Entrepreneurship and Innovation

170 grow from within

tencies for applying their existing go-to-market competencies
to these fledgling businesses.
These are all good suggestions, but the literature’s focus on
the type of innovation as the unit of analysis (e.g., radical, dis-
ruptive, or discontinuous) can disguise actionable insights for
managers. Scaling up proven new concepts and making the transi-
tion to an ongoing business can be difficult for a company, regard-
less of whether the underlying concept is radical, disruptive, or
discontinuous. We believe that the appropriate unit of analysis
for helping firms cope with transition and scaling challenges
is not the product or technology in question, but rather the
firm’s business systems. We noted earlier that a corporate
entrepreneurship effort should generally be focused along par-
ticular business system dimensions. If the transition and scal-
ing of proven concepts is understood to be a dominant
problem, then the corporate entrepreneurship focus may need
to emphasize those dimensions of the business system that are
most closely associated with transition and scaling: customers,
organization, supply chain, and networks.
Beyond this, we’ve noticed four practices that appear to
make transition and scaling a surmountable challenge for firms:

• Engage in complete business system design up front, to help
anticipate where the transition and scaling problems are likely to
occur. A new business system design will typically involve
changes in several dimensions of your business system at
once. Some firms have formal processes for integrating
their basic assumptions about customer value propositions
and the competitive ecosystem as they consider different
business systems. This type of planning seems to help
firms anticipate transition and scaling challenges. Chapter
2 covered some of the elements of complete business
system planning.