Page 20 - Grow from Within Mastering Corporate Entrepreneurship and Innovation

Entrepreneurship, Innovation, and Organic Growth 7

vation, and the original products might not be your company’s
core today.
Researcher, teacher, and business strategist Henry Mintzberg
observed in his classic 1979 book, The Structuring of Organiza-
tions, that as companies grow, they evolve structures, processes,
and cultures that emphasize efficiency in addressing their core
markets. Administrative rules are implemented, and interme-
diate levels of supervision are added. Planning and coordina-
tion are standardized. This is necessary if an enterprise is to
grow its core efficiently and hence is a good thing, but it typi-
cally discourages or even punishes entrepreneurial impulses.
This is the paradox of organic growth. Entrepreneurship
enables successful companies to thrive in the first place, but
growth can eventually inhibit entrepreneurial activity.
Our work over the past decade has aimed to help change
this. An increasing number of companies have been proving
that new business creation can happen within large, estab-
lished organizations. In fact, it can thrive. Throughout the his-
tory of the corporate form, established companies have built
new businesses. What is different today is the magnitude and
frequency of new business creation activity. Particularly since
the late 1990s, corporations as diverse as DuPont, IBM, Cargill,
Siemens, Google, Accenture, and Target have built internal cor-
porate entrepreneurship capabilities that have led to profitable
new lines of business.
A U.S. national survey in 2004 by the Panel Study of Entre-
preneurial Dynamics found that one in seven entrepreneurs
was working with his or her employer on a venture. Industry
observers Dean Shepherd and Jerome Katz, in their 2004 book
Corporate Entrepreneurship, reckoned that at that rate, this
would translate into 150,000 corporate entrepreneurship proj-
ects annually in the United States. Given this scale, corporate
entrepreneurship has begun to evolve from an out-of-the-ordi-