Page 9 - Grow from Within Mastering Corporate Entrepreneurship and Innovation

viii prologue

current corporate entrepreneurship practices across a range of
industries and define the options available to companies that
were interested in growing through internal entrepreneurship,
or corporate entrepreneurship. The authors of this book were the
principal investigators on this study.
We began by conducting a review of academic and trade
publications. The academic literature predominantly examined
related but distinct issues of corporate innovation and ordinary
entrepreneurship. Among those that focused on corporate
entrepreneurship, the findings were generally too abstract or
conceptual to be useful for managers who were seeking insight
into how their company should make corporate entrepreneur-
ship actionable. Books and articles in the trade literature tended
to focus on practices for inspiring creativity, empowering proj-
ect champions, managing innovation projects, achieving break-
through or radical innovations, and creating corporate
entrepreneurship teams or groups. The recommendations were
often sound and thought-provoking, but it was rarely clear
which of the multitude of practices were worth implementing
in a corporation’s particular situation, or even where to begin.
It was also unclear how different practices might support vari-
ous kinds of strategic, corporatewide initiatives.
Our field research began with interviews with managers
regarding corporate entrepreneurship strategies, structures,
funding methods, project management processes, incentives,
and results. We quickly discovered that leading companies
were already employing many of the ideas and project man-
agement practices that were described in the trade literature.
Companies that were approaching corporate entrepreneurship
in a deliberate fashion had implemented systems for soliciting,
collecting, and evaluating ideas. Special management systems,
distinct from ordinary new product development processes,
existed for moving promising projects forward. In many cases,