Page 187 - Grow from Within Mastering Corporate Entrepreneurship and Innovation

172 grow from within

entrepreneurship organization is that it provides a
home for business builders within the firm and a
mechanism for giving them visibility with top executives.
We’ll come back to the importance of business builders in
Chapter 5.
• Build competencies in experimentation during the scaling
phase. For some firms—especially those whose products
are complex or highly integrated—the ability to build and
experiment with prototypes efficiently is valuable. The
famed Lockheed “Skunk Works” is an example of this
model. Google Labs is another, which is particularly
compelling for its market space, given the ease of
building and testing Web-based applications. Building
prototypes permits early market experimentation and
adaptation, which can be invaluable for finding the most
compelling customers and business models through
which to go to market. The philosophy here needs to be
to “fail early and cheaply” rather than spending too much
time and money on elegant, corporate-sanctioned
experiments that may be designed more for internal
political reasons than for expeditiously advancing
concrete learning goals for a concept. Thomas Edison’s
words should be a guide to expedient experimental
design: “I have not failed. I have merely found ten
thousand ways that won’t work.”

Summary

You need a corporate entrepreneurship space that is big
enough to achieve your growth objectives, and a firm that is
capable of acting in this expanded arena. The first point
requires discovering a definition of core and growth areas that