Page 224 - Grow from Within Mastering Corporate Entrepreneurship and Innovation

Leadership from All Le vels 209

Schmelkin’s team has since expanded the portfolio and con-
tinues to incubate new business opportunities.
So what is required from leadership at the various horizons
of development, to use terminology from earlier in the book?
For Riedel it’s quite clear:

At the very early stage of incubation, call it the $50,000 to
$100,000 level, at a maximum it requires a buy-in of the
CEO. But if the CEO says to the operating units in, for exam-
ple, an executive committee meeting, “this kind of innovation-
slash-incubation is worth to me an annual investment of ten
million dollars and it’s not for discussion, you can review it
with me but I’m not going to make a change to it because you
feel differently,” it has already sort of legitimized the child.

The second stage in the process, putting your team together,
is more challenging, according to Riedel. The people you want
to bring to your team are often looked at as the “high-poten-
tials” whom no one wants to give up. “The task is to say, ‘I’m
looking for people in your units where I need the functional
input and it must be this particular profile because otherwise
I don’t think I can be successful.’”
And the third step in the process, acquiring funding, is more
difficult still. Riedel explained:

For example, now that we’ve transitioned this cell therapy
program into the bio-science global business unit I can tell
you every year when we go to the budget cycle and we go to
prioritize the pipeline and the investments, it is a lot easier for
some strange reason for the business units to put this program
on the question mark list than any of their own. . . . It’s sort of
like something imposed on them by corporate, as opposed to
my own brainchild, and therefore not treated the same way.