Page 213 - Grow from Within Mastering Corporate Entrepreneurship and Innovation

198 grow from within

sessions where the corporate entrepreneurs get together and
share their challenges and solutions. The corporate entrepre-
neurship group leader should play the role of facilitator rather
than boss, providing guidance and assistance where necessary.
Though external experts can help, nothing compares to receiv-
ing guidance and insight from people who are encountering
similar challenges within the same company.
Focus is critical, but it’s also tricky. As mentioned, corporate
entrepreneurship groups can become overly focused on the
projects at hand and lose track of other critical elements, such
as external networking, coaching, and portfolio balancing.
Focus means different things at the project level and at the
group level. Individual corporate entrepreneurs should be as
focused as possible on building their businesses. More specif-
ically, they should organize their efforts around resolving the
uncertainties that they’ve identified and testing the assump-
tions underlying their plans. At the group level, focus means
keeping everyone pursuing activities that in the aggregate lead
to a well-balanced portfolio of opportunities, as well as keep-
ing the corporate entrepreneurship group engaged with the
right people, both across the company and externally. This
means creating a strategic frame and selection criteria that
everyone can understand and act on. The most effective cor-
porate entrepreneurship groups build a clear picture for them-
selves and others of how their activities fit within the
company’s overall strategy. Clarity in this regard additionally
enhances the group’s case across the company. It can be diffi-
cult to defend a corporate entrepreneurship program when
even the group’s leader is unable to cogently articulate how it
fits within the company’s long-term strategy.
Finally, any high-performance group has to incorporate some
form of team management: coordinating functions, metrics,
feedback, and the like. While the way these activities are man-