Page 68 - Grow from Within Mastering Corporate Entrepreneurship and Innovation

Ne w Business Design 55

activities that make up a business. Porter’s Five Forces frame-
work, introduced in the early 1980s, recognized that firms and
their products exist within a larger system of competitive
forces. Competitors often find it difficult to respond to inno-
vations outside an industry’s accepted innovation vectors,
because each dimension requires a different set of capabilities.
No other MP3 player manufacturers were equipped to respond
quickly to Apple’s iPod. Enterprise Rent-A-Car’s entrenched
rental car competitors, such as Hertz and Avis, found it diffi-
cult to respond to Enterprise’s targeting of the replacement
rental car segment and its placement of rental car locations in
the neighborhoods where people live and work, rather than at
airports. In fact, the incumbents took years to respond effec-
tively. By some measures, Enterprise is today the country’s
largest auto rental company.
The same thinking applies to corporate entrepreneurship.
We must expand the existing innovation paradigm to include
the full horizon of innovative threats and opportunities. A rich
body of work addresses the challenges of technology manage-
ment and new product development (NPD); however, while
these are clearly critical subjects, very few attempts have been
made to present a comprehensive, strategic picture of innova-
tion across a company.
Before we examine business systems in more detail, consider
the case of one of the world’s top convenience retailers.

A Tale of Two Gas Stations

As business researchers, we find that many of the most power-
ful phenomena don’t fit in a laboratory. We thrive on discover-
ing comparative examples of success and failure within the
same firm on similar projects. This is difficult to do, and it is
even more difficult to find executives who are willing and able