Page 44 - Grow from Within Mastering Corporate Entrepreneurship and Innovation

Understanding Corporate Entrepreneurship 31

ciency and optimizing what they do best. We’ll see how the
right kinds of objectives, organizations, and initiatives can
overcome this bias.
While Hunt’s team sought new business opportunities
that were unlikely to grow unaided within business units,
other companies have created programs to help established
businesses achieve breakthroughs, change the way they
operate, address reduced differentiation in the market for
their products or services (“commoditization”), and just gen-
erally beat the competition. Robert A. “Bob” Cooper, then
executive director of DuPont’s Knowledge Intensive Uni-
versity, developed comprehensive methodologies within the
DuPont Corporation to help its established businesses revise
the ways in which they compete and find new paths to
growth. The program, which came to be known as Market
Driven Innovation, started as a directive in 1999 from
DuPont’s then-new CEO, Charles Holliday, to help DuPont’s
dozens of businesses fight commoditization. Today, Cooper
leads a program at the Kellogg School that brings the
methodology to a wide range of companies.
BP’s chief technology officer for digital and communication
technologies, Phiroz Darukhanavala, responded to yet a dif-
ferent directive. In 1999, BP’s CEO, John Browne, challenged
Darukhanavala with figuring out how to bring digital and
communications technologies into BP to add substantial, quan-
tifiable value. He invited Darukhanavala to propose whatever
he felt he needed to accomplish the mission. Darukhanavala
requested “a small budget, a small team, and no authority.” He
was serious. After being questioned by Lord Browne and BP’s
chief information officer, John Leggate, regarding his modest
request, the newly minted CTO responded that his mission
was to encourage others to adapt and adopt new technologies,
not to develop them from scratch: