Inside Corporate Innovation [Paperback]

The new wave of organizational innovations involves new types of arrangements between individuals and corporations. It is likely to continue to produce new organizational forms, spanning the entire range of combinations of markets and hierarchies and involving complex, sometimes protracted negotiation processes between individuals and corporate entities. Such negotiation processes, we believe, will be an increasingly pervasive aspect of corporate life and an important mechanism for facilitating the new integration of individualism and big business through corporate entrepreneurship.Chapter 1

Internal Corporate Venturing

Innovation and Entrepreneurship in Established Firms

Major changes have taken place in American business during the last 20 years. Self-confidence based on a position of great prestige in the world economy, a sense of being the best and the brightest, has given way to a position characterized by self-doubt and defensiveness. After World War II, and throughout the 1950s and 1960s, European and Japanese managers trooped dutifully to the United States to visit its corporations and business schools, in order to learn the secrets of success of American business. Many American corporations were seen as invincible leaders in technology, marketing, and organization. For some European observers, the American challenge represented a crucial event, requiring fundamental changes in the ways of doing business on the part of the Europeans in order to be able to respond. For other observers, the preeminence of American business was simply viewed as threatening the autonomy and economic welfare of Western Europe if not the rest of the world.

During the 1970s, the tables turned dramatically, and during the first half of the 1980s, the theme of Managing Our Way to Economic Decline has dominated the headlines in the American business press. American management has been seeking to catch up and learn new skills and new apprl#å