Page 63 - Grow from Within Mastering Corporate Entrepreneurship and Innovation

50 grow from within

explicit needs of existing customers, and so on. Incremental
changes such as these are distinct from new business design.
If you’re building truly new businesses for your company,
by definition you’ll need to do at least some things differently.
This presents the corporate entrepreneur’s fundamental chal-
lenge: leveraging what the parent company does well, while encour-
aging others within and outside the company to make the changes
necessary to support the new business. These could be behavioral
changes, new suppliers, different channels, a range of new
activities, and even, possibly, new competencies. The key is to
be strategic about what you need changed and whom you ask
to do the changing. (We’re really talking about a political strat-
egy to advocate on behalf of well-considered change to enable
new businesses. We will come to that in later chapters.)
The first step in defining what might need to change is to
stop thinking in terms of new product or service development
and think instead about new business design. You don’t know
what might need to change until you have a notion of how your
new business will operate.
As companies venture beyond incremental innovation, more
and more aspects of the way the company does business may
need to change to enable the new offering. Does a new product
require changing the delivery and support systems that the com-
pany uses in order to achieve success in the marketplace? Might
salespeople need to approach different target customers with
different value propositions through different channels? Might
the supply chain require enhancement or redirection to support
the new opportunity? Perhaps our existing brands don’t quite
fit the new product. Should we forgo what might otherwise be
an excellent opportunity simply because it doesn’t fit neatly into
our company’s existing systems?
Sometimes the answer should be a confident yes. Some
opportunities just don’t fit, particularly for companies that are