Page 66 - Grow from Within Mastering Corporate Entrepreneurship and Innovation

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Product or service innovation is clearly part of this rubric, but
only a part. Innovation in business systems is about creating
new value, not just new things. Innovation is not just about new
products, or even about changes to individual business activ-
ities, but about how value-added changes might affect and
enhance the overall function of businesses as comprehensive
systems of interlocking activities.
Every business is a complex system. Established global com-
panies in particular create ever more complex structures and
processes with which they build value in the marketplace.
These systems not only provide competitive power but also
create complex inhibitors to change. Failing to keep this com-
plex set of existing activities in mind when pursuing corporate
entrepreneurship initiatives can moderate your success and
even lead to failure.
Consider your own company. How often is this kind of
holistic business thinking introduced into the early stages of
development? At many companies, particularly technology-
oriented ones, many of the business-related questions surface
later—sometimes much later, and often too late. The time to
ask business systems questions is early in the process, as many
of these decisions might even affect the design of the product
or service.
For instance, one company with which the authors have
worked spent two years on a new product concept aimed at
a market in which the company had a small presence that it
wanted to expand. The company, known for its creativity and
design excellence, came up with an elegant solution. At a
milestone review, however, a senior executive asked about
market size. The working estimate was only $300 million over
10 years, which was not considered a significant enough
opportunity to pursue. However, in revisiting the basic mar-
ket assumptions and targets, the project was redefined to