Corporate entrepreneurship: teaching managers to be entrepreneurs

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