Core businesses become core for a reason: their business designs work–or worked. Eventually, all businesses require renovation. Sometimes, they require revolution. Some signs are obvious, like falling margins or shrinking market shares, though it could be that you’re just underperforming. What other factors might indicate you need a fundamental redesign? In our post on Fast [...]
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I received a great question from a reader of Grow From Within about the relationship of corporate entrepreneurship—that is, largely internal new business creation—to forming a subsidiary or spinning out a new business concept. “Can’t these be pursued within a firm together as a strategy? What is the impact of corporate entrepreneurship on the internal [...]
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How can corporate entrepreneurs be sure whether they are moving in the right direction in the early stages? In our post on Fast Company today, we highlight three major signposts of progress toward building new businesses.
CEO and Senior Management Commitment is Solid.
Your Energies are Focused.
You’re Already Planning for Transition and Scaling.
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We’re pleased that our article on innovation leadership was placed front and center in the Chicago Chamber of Commerce’s newsletter today. The article picks up on some of the themes in previous posts here: That corporate entrepreneurship is about more than new products and services and that structure and process are not the enemies of innovation. It emphasizes [...]
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Rob Wolcott is quoted in this businessweek article about faster, cheaper product development in India, “driven by scarce resources and attention to customers’ immediate needs, not their lifestyle wants.” This type of innovation, aimed at serving vast swaths of humanity with very low income, is not about just redesigning products to take out cost. In Chapter 6 [...]
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Fostering corporate entrepreneurship means a new focus on attracting and retaining people with the determination and skill to build bridges to future growth. Assuming your company is open to the possibility of entrepreneurial growth, do you have what it takes to be a corporate entrepreneur? This posting at Fast Company describes five characteristics of the species [...]
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Guest Post by Stephanie Wolcott
Mary Tripsas from Harvard Business School recently reported in the New York Times on two new online platforms for sharing eco-friendly technology: the Eco-Patent Commons provides environmental patents to anyone for free; The Green Xchange, which launches in 2010, will facilitate licensing of patents to non-competitors. While it remains to be seen [...]
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In theory, there’s no difference between theory and practice.
But in practice, there is.”
– Lawrence “Yogi” Berra, American Baseball Legend
How do you successfully build a corporate entrepreneurship capacity? Our research has found that it’s a multi-stage process.
The first key element is a mandate for growth or transformation accompanied by a vision that points in the general [...]
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On Friday, I had the privilege to join Jim Blasingame on his nationwide radio show, The Small Business Advocate. Jim refers to himself as the “small business advocate” and that he certainly is. In addition to a live radio show in 50 markets and blog and online archive of interviews, Jim is a champion for [...]
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3M’s innovation center, built about 3 years ago, sits across a pond from a “square mile of research labs” focused on dozens of different industry groups. The center’s focus is on exposing customers to the broad array of 3M technologies, in order to help create innovative solutions. I was part of a group of seven innovation [...]
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In our six years of research on innovation and corporate entrepreneurship, we did not find a single company that felt they lacked good ideas. Rather, the difficult task was creating an organization and processes that refine ideas, build businesses, and bring the best of them to market.
There is no one-size-fits-all structure and process to building [...]
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One of the great myths of innovation is that it is about breakthrough products or services, often developed by technology entrepreneurs like Steve Jobs of Apple Computer, Marc Andreessen of Netscape and Jim Clark of Silicon Graphics.
It’s true that most great companies were founded with some fundamental innovation and built through the drive and determination [...]
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Entrepreneurial innovation drives economic growth for individuals, corporations and society. Fortunate companies with a strong culture and tradition of innovation might achieve new business creation without a formal effort. But for most companies, taking an innovative vision to market is a process full of pitfalls, requiring explicit strategic direction and organizational adaptation.
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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Corporate Entrepreneurship and Innovation Explored at More than 30 Global Companies Over Six Years of Research
NEW YORK, October 2 — new book by two leading experts on innovation explores some of the surprising new ways that large companies create innovative new businesses.
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As the global economy emerges from recession, the focus in the executive suite is already shifting from cost cutting to recovering top-line growth. What role can the CMO play? If the CMO is truly to be a growth champion for the corporation, she or he can’t simply rely on traditional marketing and brand-building techniques.
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Creating Entrepreneurial Behavior within a Mature Company – Jim Blasingame's Small Business Advocate, November, 13, 2009.
True Marketing Doesn’t Just Sell the Story – Advertising Age, September 2, 2009.
Playing Well With Others – Wall Street Journal, June 22, 2009.
