Page 21 - Grow from Within Mastering Corporate Entrepreneurship and Innovation

8 grow from within

nary, serendipitous, champion-led crusade to a managed,
repeatable, team-based process.

By the Numbers

Many large corporations do better at corporate entrepreneur-
ship than most people think. People generally perceive start-
up companies as being the primary drivers of new business
creation. While this is not a myth, the contrary notion—that
large companies are therefore not good at new business cre-
ation—is in many ways untrue. This can be a dangerous mis-
perception that limits the vision and activity of corporate
leaders and rank-and-file employees who are considering
building their careers around entrepreneurship-led growth.
Could an independent entrepreneur have developed and
launched the Boeing 787 Dreamliner? Nearly impossible. The
resources, capabilities, and credibility of an established com-
pany enable this and other types of technological and market-
place accomplishment.
This perceptive bias against large corporations’ contribution
to our economy’s new business development success is partly
due to a survivorship bias in our sample set: we see only the
small companies that succeed. We don’t see the thousands of
independent entrepreneurial ventures that fail or languish for
years on life support—what some venture capitalists refer to
as the “walking dead.” From the media’s perspective, rags-to-
riches success stories make good copy. In reality, start-up com-
panies fail most of the time. Large companies often succeed in
generating new businesses, but their failures—how the mighty
have fallen—are often seen as more compelling news. In some
ways, this skew in coverage is sound. The spectacular success
of a start-up venture is indeed a newsworthy accomplishment.