Page 40 - Grow from Within Mastering Corporate Entrepreneurship and Innovation

Understanding Corporate Entrepreneurship 27

The executive agreed that the idea was to expose as many
people as possible to the mindset and tools of the corporate
entrepreneur. This would enable those who had a predilection
to do new things, while raising awareness companywide as to
how others can help make this happen. That quality control
specialist might be quite innovative and even become an entre-
preneurial leader within the company, or he might not. The
point is not that everyone should become entrepreneurial but,
rather, that the company should provide an environment that
enables and nurtures entrepreneurial activities (i.e., a place
where individuals with the aptitude and interest can build new
growth paths for the company). We will describe different
ways of doing so in Chapter 3.
It might just be that if everyone in your company were to
become entrepreneurial, the company would blow up. It might
disintegrate into numerous small groups that were pursuing
the future, with no one minding the present. The point is bal-
ance. Consider Google, which will be explored in Chapter 3 in
some detail. While it focuses on recruiting, hiring, and retain-
ing people with proven entrepreneurial skills, and while the
culture and structure of the company encourage new concept
development and business creation, large swaths of the com-
pany focus on keeping the server farms watered and the users
cultivated. Not everyone at Google needs to be actively driv-
ing new growth.
We are saved by reality. Only a subset of the population
appears to be suited and motivated to pursue new business
creation as a regular course. While we argue that everyone in
a company should at least be aware of the requirements of sub-
stantial new business development efforts and the importance
of these initiatives to the company, only a subset of these peo-
ple need to be dedicated to substantially innovative projects or
creating new businesses. This can be a morphing subset, with