Corporate entrepreneurship: teaching managers to be entrepreneurs

More documents

Recommendations

Info

JMD22,4336(2) Is it better to try and identify people within the company who alreadyhave entrepreneurial leanings, or can any competent, motivated managerlearn to act and think like an entrepreneur?(3) Is corporate entrepreneurship really an oxymoron? Can people actuallybe trained and then allowed to act like start-up entrepreneurs within analready, well-established company. Or, as stated before, are there toomany corporate antibodies in place to allow such a phenomenon?(4) If there are such antibodies at work, how do large companies learn toidentify and overcome them?(5) Finally, is there a real return on investment in such educationalendeavors? Do any new, truly entrepreneurial ventures come to fruitionthat justify both the program’s expense and the managers’ time awayfrom other potentially more productive and certain activities? Ultimately,will increased entrepreneurial behavior actually lead to the capturing ofhigher margin, durable new business opportunities by the company?Summary of findingsFor purposes of confidentiality, the author has chosen to consolidate thegeneral findings from these four companies. Several sources of data served as afoundation for the following results. First, many of these programs haverequired that participants develop full-blown business plans and then competewith others in front of an executive team for resources and support. Thus, thereis some hard data regarding business plans that have actually developed intosuccessful businesses. We also have feedback from senior management, HRrepresentatives and the participants themselves as to how much they actuallylearned and could apply within their own businesses. While there are somecompany specific differences in results, the degree of similarity in the findingswas impressive.Nature v nurturePerhaps the first question is the most critical one for companies consideringteaching managers to be entrepreneurs. We now believe, beyond any doubt,that much of what start-up entrepreneurs do can be taught to relativelyordinary but motivated individuals. So what do start-up entrepreneurs knowand do that can potentially be learned by others?Start-up entrepreneurs do three things very well. They identifyopportunities, shape and develop these opportunities, and then they create abusiness structure to turn these opportunities into successful businessventures. The starting point is an idea that is new. This new idea could berevolutionary or evolutionary and it might not even be theirs, but there issomething different about it. Start-up entrepreneurs then begin to learn aboutthis idea to see if is just an idea or an opportunity. They change it, shape it,modify, and sometimes discard it for something better. Once they are satisfied
that their idea has commercial merit, they begin to build an organization ofpeople and resources to go about capturing the opportunity.Identifying and shaping ideas can be learned. We have many great examplesof managers who never considered themselves creative or innovative, whofound significant new business opportunities as a result of their entrepreneurialtraining. A Siemens manager, for example, found a unique way to stop creditcard fraud through fingerprinting technology. A PDVSA team identified ahuge commercial market for one of their waste products that they used tothrow away. A Mott’s employee identified a way to start a spin-off business,based on Mott’s back-office competencies. None of these opportunities wouldhave been discovered had these participants not been exposed to a trainingmilieu, in which ideas were not only encouraged and supported but challengedas well. So, the ability to think creatively and to be innovative is a humancondition. Some people exhibit these tendencies naturally while others need acatalyst for these inherent capabilities to emerge. Education and particularlycoaching turned out to be two of the most important ways in which innovationand creativity were stimulated to emerge. What the entrepreneurship trainingdid most effectively, was give participants the tools, techniques, and disciplineto distinguish between a good idea and a good opportunity.Clearly, the most “teachable” aspect of the opportunity process is thebusiness plan. Business plans have both clear structure and clear contentrequirements. In fact, the business plan was perhaps our most importantteaching tool. All the theory, case studies, and group discussions could notreplace the tremendous amount of learning that went on when participants wererequired to turn their idea into a full-blown business plan. The written businessplan is one of the few ways that we could determine whether the participant’sidea was just that, an idea, or a commercial opportunity. Every participant whocompleted a business plan said it was the most important (and perhaps one ofthe most painful) learning experience about being an entrepreneur that they hadever had. Managers who have gone through the development of a completedbusiness plan are not the same when they finish. They have had to learn aboutmarketing, finance, value, cash flow projections, etc., to a point where they canstand in front of their peers, senior managers or venture capitalists and convincethem that their opportunity is worth investing in.It was also interesting that many of the program participants said theyeither knew how to write a business plan or had already written one prior tocoming to the program. It was clear from our experience that very few of thesepeople actually had business planning skills that would pass muster in front ofa venture capitalist or an internal venture officer.Corporateentrepreneurship337Identifying people with the “right stuff”One of our most surprising results, and one that we had not predicted, was thatwe were not able to predict with any reasonable certainty which managers
Page 5: an opportunity that his competitors
Page 11 and 12: companies were either unwilling or
Page 13 and 14: First, a couple of the spectacular
Page 15 and 16: entrepreneur. When experience, crea

Corporate entrepreneurship: teaching managers to be entrepreneurs

Create successful ePaper yourself

Delete template?

Save as template?