Page 231 - Grow from Within Mastering Corporate Entrepreneurship and Innovation

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your venture. The outside world may include overseas mar-
kets, where not only customer needs but also contextual fac-
tors are quite different. Open innovation and globalization are
critical factors to understand as your company pursues growth
through corporate entrepreneurship. Each trend not only offers
new ways to approach innovation but also intensifies the
necessity to build true new business creation capabilities.
The global financial crisis that began in 2008 underscored
the increasingly interconnected nature of our world. As com-
panies become more effective at capitalizing on global
resources, the more critical corporate entrepreneurship will
become as a repeatable, dependable competency. As compa-
nies respond to consumer needs in countries and conditions
around the world, entrepreneurial activity will bring the power
of commerce to bear not only on day-to-day concerns but also
on the most critical challenges facing humanity.

Open Innovation and Innovation Brokering

The mindset of many businesses has changed fundamentally
in the past decade. Rather than depending exclusively on inter-
nal knowledge and resources, companies are pursuing the
range and diversity of development occurring outside their
walls. Many firms have adopted more collaborative business
models and improved their internal capabilities to search,
refine, and integrate external knowledge and opportunities.
They are abandoning the infamous Not Invented Here syn-
drome—an affliction of some corporate cultures in which exter-
nally developed concepts tend to be eschewed—and
attempting to embrace collaboration.
Henry Chesbrough, a thought leader in the field, defines
open innovation as “a paradigm that assumes the firms can