Corporate Entrepreneurship: Surviving Tomorrow’s Innovation Highways

While the argument for successful corporate entrepreneurship remains the same today as it did when 3M invented the post-it 40 years ago, today’s ultra high-speed innovation environment places enormous pressure on companies to optimize the idea to innovation to corporate entrepreneurship cycle.

After all, there are 6 major factors that have exponentially accelerated the rate of innovation in the world today:

Entrepreneurship is sexy. Entrepreneurs seem to have made it to the top of the world. They are talked about everywhere: in corporate boardrooms, front page of magazines, featured on TV shows, and in social circles. Independent entrepreneurs are exploding worldwide and collaborating like never before resulting in extremely creative solutions to unmet needs being developed and launched with increasing ease.

Plenty of money for funding. VCs and large corporations alike have reserves of cash like the world has never seen before. Furthermore, an increasingly wealthy middle class also has money to spend resulting in more angel investors. Getting access to funding is no longer a dark mystery.

From the west to the east. The biggest entrepreneurial success stories used to predominantly come from the West (namely North America and Western Europe), but not anymore. The East has caught up in a big way. TATA, Alibaba anyone?

Rapid rate of disruptive technologies. Businesses are introducing disruptive technologies faster than we have ever seen and are able to market them to increasingly more consumers via marketing tools that weren’t available 10-15 years ago.

Readily available distribution channels. Not too long ago, discovering and putting into place distribution channels was the Achilles’ heel of many companies. Not any more. Companies (large or small) have access to distribution channels of global reach, allowing them to scale very rapidly.

Technology adoption is for everyone. Whether it is the toddler in a stroller playing on mommy’s iPad at the super market, grandma and grandpa playing candy crush on their iPhones, or everyone in between looking for the next techno gadget or app, technology has become for everyone.

The impact on corporations is that they must not only implement a dynamic and comprehensive idea generation to innovation to corporate entrepreneurship program, but they must excel at it. These 3 phases are the critical gears of corporate entrepreneurship and what will separate the corporate winners from the losers in today’s and, more importantly, tomorrow’s ultra high-speed innovation highway.