Page 243 - Grow from Within Mastering Corporate Entrepreneurship and Innovation

228 grow from within

sistent with corporate strategy) during the recession of
1990–1991 retained or gained market leadership.
One of our colleagues in the Kellogg Innovation Network, a
former Fortune 500 CEO, shared a technique for influencing
decision makers at her prior employer to motivate and main-
tain investment in critical projects: start a rumor that the com-
petition is doing it!
Along the same lines, venture capitalists and competitors
may be waiting for you to let your best ideas and people go.
Vinod Khosla, a founder of Sun Microsystems and one of the
world’s top venture capitalists, described the business envi-
ronment from his perspective in a March 2009 Wall Street Jour-
nal article:

MR. MURRAY: What about general economic conditions?
Credit availability, the ability to launch any of these invest-
ments as IPOs. How does that affect your calculations?
MR. KHOSLA: I’m sort of a permanent optimist. I actu-
ally think this is a great opportunity. Yes, we can’t do an IPO.
But I’ll tell you every advanced project at Dow is being shut
down, or at DuPont or at your favorite technology company.
Those are the people who have the creative ideas, who will do
the most advanced stuff, so the number of opportunities we
are seeing with start-ups is going up.

It is inevitable that some corporate entrepreneurship pro-
grams will be scaled back or canceled. Those are times when
corporate entrepreneurs and leaders may be forced to fly below
the radar, undertaking more pilot programs and learning
efforts than full-fledged new business development. It is
always a good idea to identify the critical uncertainties in a cor-
porate entrepreneurship project and attempt to undertake
brief, inexpensive experiments to resolve them. During a