For corporate managers who wish to spearhead innovative new businesses within the existing structure, success depends as much on their company’s innovation environment as on the strength of their business concept. The pivotal environmental factors are (1) who, if anyone, within the company has primary ownership for creating new businesses? And (2) Is money dedicated to corporate entrepreneurship or are new business concepts funded in an ad hoc manner, through “slush funds”? .

If you work in a company where the early stages of new business conception are explicitly supported, encouraged, and often strategically channeled, and which systematically brings these businesses to the attention of top management, then your company may fit the Enabler model. (If you company’s approach is more ad-hoc, it’s more likely to be aligned with the Opportunist Model, discussed in our last posting.

The Enabler Model assumes that there are ample good ideas around the company and, more importantly, that there are individuals and teams  willing to flesh them out. Therefore, recruiting and retaining people who have entrepreneurial dispositions—and who can and want to operate within a large company—is essential. Executive engagement is also essential if people are to trust that the company is committed to turning good and proven concepts into real businesses. Otherwise, project funding can become a casualty of conflicts with established businesses, or can degenerate into “bowling for dollars”—as an alternative source of funds for ordinary business unit projects, or for projects that the company is not particularly serious about.

So what’s your best approach for working within the Enabler model?  First, make sure that top management is truly committed to the Enabler process.  Senior-level sponsorship is essential to all corporate entrepreneurship projects, as we highlighted in discussing the opportunist model.  Beyond this, take special effort to consider how your project, if successful, can be integrated with the companies existing processes and brands.  You may have to be innovative in more dimensions than just technology, product or solution in order to ultimately successful.  

In the most evolved versions of the Enabler Model, companies provide clear criteria for selecting which opportunities to pursue, guidelines for applying for funding, decision-making transparency, and, perhaps above all, well-defined engagement from senior management.  The selection criteria for project funding can serve as an important expression of corporate strategic intent. In some cases, there may be significant benefits to mine from cross-divisional collaboration. In other cases, a company may want to encourage innovation in the spaces between businesses or by taking divisional capabilities into entirely new markets. Providing such strategic direction may deter corporate entrepreneurship in certain business dimensions, but if it is well designed, it should encourage a critical mass of effort in those areas that are deemed most important to the company’s future.

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Read more from Robert Wolcott and Michael Lippitz on how corporate entrepreneurs can take their vision to market and help their companies Grow From Within.

Robert Wolcott and Michael Lippitz are leading authorities on innovation and corporate entrepreneurship at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, and co-authors of Grow From Within: Mastering Corporate Entrepreneurship and Innovation (McGraw Hill, 2009). In the past six years, they have studied more than 30 companies across industry sectors and developed an ongoing dialogue with them about corporate entrepreneurship through the Kellogg Innovation Network (KIN).