Entrepreneurship in Larger Companies

Entrepreneurship in large and established companies is vital for their long-term success. Incumbent firms face many challenges ranging from global competition to digitization. In times past, being caught flat-footed might have set a company back several years, but it could recover. Today, the threats are existential in nature, and competition can emerge quickly and from the places one least expects. Successful incumbents must ensure that they do not become self-complacent but instead look to renew themselves through corporate entrepreneurship (sometimes also called intrapreneurship). Many books and articles document the overall importance of corporate entrepreneurship and associated business renewal, and many advisors consider the important perspective of the CEO looking across the whole company. An example is Leading Breakthrough Innovation in Established Companies (Harvard Business School Press), which provides a longer reference set for the CEO and corporate-wide perspective. This chapter uses a different lens—it focuses instead on the perspective of a middle-to-upper-level manager contemplating a potential assignment to lead an internal venture in a large company. Befitting this series, we build lists of important considerations that this manager should evaluate. These lists are not exhaustive, but they offer corporate leaders a starting point for a careful due diligence and action plan around new ventures.