Grow from Within: Mastering Corporate Entrepreneurship and Innovation

IBM reports $15 billion of annual new revenues from 22 Emerging Business Opportunities.

In 2008, $4 billion in revenues from companywide innovation efforts allowed Whirlpool to maintain its top line, despite global recession and the steep drop in housing markets.

A DuPont business group leader, Ellen Kullman, backed an ambitious new business creation program and later became DuPont’s CEO.

Each of these companies has learned how to create new businesses on a repeatable basis. In Grow from Within, two leading scholars from the Kellogg School of Management explain how your company can discover the right approach to corporate entrepreneurship and make it profitable.

Taking innovation to the next level, corporate entrepreneurship is the process of building new businesses within an established organization— new businesses that are distinct from the core company but that leverage some of its most powerful assets. Grow from Within examines:

• The fundamentals of designing a new business
• The four dominant models of corporate entrepreneurship
• Ways to align your innovation program with your strategy
• Leadership requirements for developing new businesses

Innovation is critical to business success and growth, but it’s only the first step. Without strategically driven processes to turn insights into growing businesses, even the best ideas can fail. Creativity is often serendipitous; innovation management should not be.

Grow from Within provides the knowledge you need to conceive and design valuable new businesses that breathe life into ideas and dramatically improve your top and bottom lines.

About the Authors

Robert C. Wolcott, Ph.D., a faculty member of the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University, is the cofounder and executive director of the Kellogg Innovation Network (KIN): kinglobal.org. He is a frequent speaker worldwide, advisor to governments, and cofounder of strategy consultancy and venture firm Clareo Partners LLC (clareopartners.com).

Michael J. Lippitz, Ph.D., is a senior research fellow with the Center for Research in Technology & Innovation (CRTI) at the Kellogg School of Management, a principal with Clareo Partners LLC, and a senior policy analyst with the Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA).