In this video roundtable, sponsored by DeVry University’s Keller Graduate School of Management, Rob Wolcott joins Ken Atwater (GE Healthcare IT Solutions), to share insights on corporate entreprenership and innovation project management, covering issues of leadership, organization, personnel and culture.

In our post at Fast Company this week, we explain the Enabler Model of Corporate Entrepreneurship, in which resources are available for new business creation, but there is no designated organizational ownership.  In other words,  the early stages of new business conception are explicitly supported, encouraged, but no executive or team is explicitly charged with scaling proven concepts and transitioning them back into the organization.  

The Enabler Model assumes that there are ample good ideas around the company and, more importantly, that there are individuals and teams  willing to flesh them out.  In the most evolved versions of the Enabler Model, companies provide clear criteria for selecting which opportunities to pursue, guidelines for applying for funding, decision-making transparency, and, perhaps above all, well-defined engagement from senior management.  

This is the second of four posts covering, in turn, each of the four models of corporate entrepreneurship described in Grow From Within.

We are delighted that a Consumer Goods Technology Magazine just published a concise summary of the Four Models of Corporate Entrepreneurship in their latest issue.

In our post at Fast Company this week, we explain the Opportunist Model of Corporate Entrepreneurship and what you should do if you’re trying to build a new business in an environment without designated organizational ownership or resources.  In general, the Opportunist Model works well only in trusting corporate cultures that are open to experimentation and have multiple executives who can sponsor new business creation.

This is the first of what will be four posts covering, in turn, each of the four models of corporate entrepreneurship described in Grow From Within.

This past weekend, I was privileged to be part of the Innovation  & Humanity Summit hosted by the Center for Innovation & Humanity at Chapman University in Orange, CA.  KIN Global 2009 delegate and good friend Glenn Llopis launched the Center and the Summit following his attendance at KIN Global at the Kellogg School.  He partnered with Chapman’s Vice Chancellor and Entrepreneurship Center Director, P.K. Shukla.

In addition to leaders from business, academia and non-profits, the Summit included leading names in the realm of conscious capitalism and socially responsible, effective leadership such as Jeff Klein and Will Marré.  For more on this exceptional event, see a blog posting on the Summit’s site written by Walt Fawcett, one of the Summit delegates during the program.

In our Fast Company post this week, Rob reports on his trip to Iceland last month with members of the Kellogg Innovation Network (KIN). The people of Iceland are coming together in the wake of the financial crash. Iceland has a long road ahead to pay down a debt equivalent to over 800% of GDP, but many Icelanders understand that the only good way out in the long run is to create substantial new value through innovation and entrepreneurship. We were impressed by the creativity and scope of entrepreneurial activity in this country of 320,000 people, and we’d like more people to know about Iceland’s exceptional story.

The Kellogg School of Management and the Kellogg Innovation Network (KIN) have been pivotal to our work in corporate entrepreneurship and innovation.  In fact, we originally uncovered the demand for better solutions to new business creation within established firms from our KIN members, innovation executives at large global companies.

We’re quite pleased to report that the Kellogg School has featured Grow From Within not only in the quarterly alumni publication, but also online on the front page of Kellogg’s website.  Please take a look.  The front page content rotates, so use this link to the article if you don’t find it featured at the first.  The article provides more detail on the background of our work, as well as summarizing the main take-aways.

For those interested in trends in international innovation, here’s the podcast of an interview I did with the organizers of an Innovation Summit taking place at Chapman University later this month. The discussion is based on my work with the Kellogg Innovation Network (KIN), which brings together leaders from major companies that are fostering new business design, and with my consulting firm, Clareo.

The 2010 Innovation & Humanity Summit itself will take place on January 23, 2010, bringing more than 35 speakers from six continents. Participants will come from academic, industry, nonprofit and community sectors internationally, and will include senior management from Tata, HEB, UST-Global, Pepsi Bottling Group, IBM, Yahoo, MindTree, Richmel Productions, InnovaStrat, Inc, Centre for India & Global Business and many others.

I’m looking forward to meeting fellow keynote speaker Adlai Wertman, Professor and Founder of the Society and Business Lab at the Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California. He wrote an interesting piece on the Huffington Post about how laid-off people can change the world earlier this year.

I’m also looking forward to networking with other authors there, including Steve Farber, Karen Salmansohn, Subroto Bagchi, Nick Morgan and Sam Horn, whom I already know.

In our Fast Company post yesterday, we highlight an important editorial for the business community:  The “Schumpeter” column of The Economist Holiday Edition proposes that the business community must better engage the global dialogue.  We agree.  The business community must do both what’s right and constantly explore the rights and responsibilities of operating as a business with constituencies beyond business–the consumers, governments and organizations of all types with whom we share the economy and the planet.  This is fundamental to retaining our license to operate and sustaining true global progress.

In our post yesterday at Fast Company, we describe guiding principles for building a robust network, which is one of the most important factors to succeeding as an innovator or entrepreneur, inside or outside a large corporation:

• Simple rules rule
• Determine your objectives
• Build diversity into your group