Page 34 - Grow from Within Mastering Corporate Entrepreneurship and Innovation

Understanding Corporate Entrepreneurship 21

back or spin out their central R&D laboratories and to put
greater emphasis on mimicking the Japanese rapid, incremen-
tal, production-oriented innovation model. Venture capital
financing for new business development soared in the 1990s,
not infrequently for ventures conceived by stymied employees
who were leaving large corporations. Partly in an effort to
recapture some of the benefits of their entrepreneurial employ-
ees, large corporations began setting up their own venture
funds. The Internet boom of the late 1990s further encouraged
large, established companies to rethink both threats to their
core businesses and new market opportunities. A few began
and sustained new approaches to seeking growth from within.
Some of the earliest efforts at deliberate new business creation
began in 1999 at companies such as DuPont, IBM, and
Whirlpool and continued with entrants throughout the 2000s
such as Cargill, Cisco, and Motorola.
By the turn of the twenty-first century, R&D partnerships
had proliferated, and many of them had globalized to serve
rapidly growing markets in countries such as China, India, and
Brazil. New forms of international R&D partnerships are
emerging today, fostered by the diffusion of information and
communication technologies. Meanwhile, the increasing role
of services relative to manufacturing in modern economies has
helped broaden the focus of corporate entrepreneurship
beyond new products and technologies.

What Exactly Is Corporate Entrepreneurship?

In the introduction, we defined corporate entrepreneurship as
the process by which teams within an established firm con-
ceive, foster, launch, and manage a new business that is dis-
tinct from but leverages the company’s current assets, markets,