Page 211 - Grow from Within Mastering Corporate Entrepreneurship and Innovation

196 grow from within

ing, business strategy, resource coordination, and project man-
agement. In many cases, you can find any deep technology
expertise that you need from around, or even from outside,
your company. Early on, make sure you understand what skills
you will need and recruit the right people.
Companies have a habit of assigning new, young, creative
people to corporate entrepreneurship teams. Such people can be
of great value, but don’t put them in positions where they are
required to motivate resources and support from around the
company. Corporate entrepreneurship groups, especially when
they are focused on creating truly new businesses, require
respected senior staff members, people who have a range of
existing relationships and credibility. It is also a good idea to con-
sider rotating a few people from key functions or business units
through your corporate entrepreneurship teams. They could be
involved part-time on projects, or even join full-time for a spec-
ified period of time. If these people then rotate back to other
units and functions, you’ll build a cadre of supporters who
directly understand the corporate entrepreneurship group’s mis-
sion, tools, and constraints. Top-performing groups have even
been known to cultivate and maintain a sense of alumni status
for staff members who move on. The classic example was AT&T
Bell Labs, which became an exclusive, nearly legendary frater-
nity for technologists, even if they moved on to other roles at
AT&T, its successor companies, or beyond.
Fundamentally, most people either prefer optimizing the sta-
tus quo, enhancing efficiency, executing to plan, and the like,
or tend toward strategic thinking, inventing the future, dis-
covering paths to growth, and so on. Stanford University pro-
fessor James March referred to these differing, complementary
activities in a 1991 article in Organization Science as “exploiting
the present and exploring the future.” Perhaps the most impor-
tant selection criterion is to ensure that you’ve got a core new