Page 46 - Grow from Within Mastering Corporate Entrepreneurship and Innovation

Understanding Corporate Entrepreneurship 33

chapters have been designed to protect against these failures,
although they require constant vigilance.

Too Narrow
Given the focus driven by business-as-usual processes, it is
easy to become too narrow in vision and action. The ways we
see and do things, combined with the significant internal assets
that many companies enjoy, can restrict as well as enable our
pursuit of new opportunities.

The Efficiency Constraint

There are good reasons why most established companies have
a bias against new things. Companies build structures and
processes to drive efficiency and avoid unnecessary risk. Intel-
ligent structures and processes are required as companies grow
from small, entrepreneur-led entities to large, multidivisional
enterprises. Structure, if done correctly, leads to competitive
efficiency, which becomes a core objective for companies as
they grow. But efficiency can also become a trap.
The better an organization becomes at specific activities and
processes, the more difficult it is to change. A focus on effi-
ciency in current operations is fine until the marketplace takes
a radical new direction or makes a long, slow turn. These con-
straints affect everyone operating within an established com-
pany, although the challenge for the corporate entrepreneur is
much greater. By definition, these leaders are creating new
enterprises. Aspects of the business systems they require may
or may not integrate with the systems of the existing company.
Sometimes they even conflict. Common examples would be
channel conflict, where a new business attempts to take the
company’s products through channels that are seen as com-