  Large global companies need to speed up their innovation activities to
increase competitive advantage. However, such companies' organizational
structures impede their ability to capture trends they are well aware of due to
bureaucracy, slow decision-making, distributed departments, and distributed
processes. One way to strengthen the innovation capability is through fostering
internal startups. We report findings from an embedded multiple-case study of
five internal startups in a globally distributed company to identify barriers
for software product innovation: late involvement of software developers,
executive sponsor is missing or not clarified, yearly budgeting and planning,
unclear decision-making authority, lack of digital infrastructure for
experimentation and access to data from external actors. Drawing on the
framework of continuous software engineering proposed by Fitzgerald and Stol,
we discuss the role of BizDev in software product innovation. We suggest that
lack of continuity, rather than the lack of speed, is an ultimate challenge for
internal startups in large global companies.
