Corporate Entrepreneurship: How?
Authors: Ramachandran K , Devarajan T P , Ray Sougata 
Published: August 2016

Most organizations find that their ability to identify and innovatively exploit opportunities decreases as they move from the entrepreneurial to the growth phase. However, the key to success in the highly competitive and dynamic environment that most companies presently operate in is to retain this ability. Therefore, companies need to adopt an entrepreneurial strategy — seeking competitive advantage through continuous innovation to effectively exploit identified opportunities — in order to sustain and grow under such circumstances.

For such a strategy to succeed, companies should develop an enabling economic and political ecosystem that does not impede small or large scale redeployment of resources in new ways towards creative, entrepreneurial ends. Companies have a range of options to choose from to achieve this objective. At the one end of this option spectrum is ‘focused entrepreneurship’ wherein specific innovation initiatives are created with the rest of the organization insulated from them. At the other end is a managerial approach that leads to the creation of ‘organizationwide entrepreneurship.’ Entrepreneurship in such organizations is a shared value and drives managerial behaviour in conscious and subconscious ways and creates an entrepreneurial spirit organization-wide.

Many mature organizations, unwilling to alter the status quo, tend to create focused initiatives that are mandated to identify and exploit new opportunities. While such focused initiatives may stimulate innovation, the very nature of their design erects barriers between the existing organization and the innovation effort. This makes it difficult for the organizations to access and leverage the existing capability base and to integrate new initiatives back into operational activity.

Companies intent on developing and preserving entrepreneurship organization-wide, independent of their stage of growth, create an environment in which those who believe in the attractiveness of opportunities feel encouraged to pursue them. The top managements of such companies will design an organizational context conducive to autonomous generation of entrepreneurial initiatives, provide a sense of overall direction to these initiatives, and ensure that promising ventures receive necessary resources as they move through the uncertain development process wherein: money is neither offered nor seen as a primary motivator entrepreneurial contributions are rewarded with recognition and through provision of opportunities to engage in entrepreneurial activities on a bigger scale failure is considered normal and when failure occurs, the focus is on problem solving and learning from it rather than apportioning blame appropriate processes are used to capture knowledge created in the innovation process and routines developed to enable integration of such knowledge to create organizational rents.

The contrast between patterns of focused and organization-wide entrepreneurship runs across every element of the organization starting with its mission and covering strategy, structure, systems, processes, and people skills and attitude. Institutionalizing the elements of entrepreneurship is crucial to building a sustaining competitive organization in today's business environment.