BUSINESS: Corporate Entrepreneurship (03) - Definitions part II

Covin & Miles have also presented a definition of Corporate Entrepreneurship:

Corporate entrepreneurship necessarily implies the presence of innovation, but there is more to corporate entrepreneurship than innovation.
Innovation refers to the introduction of a new product, process, technology, system, technique, resource or capability to the firm or its market. [1]

Finally, Sharma & Chrisman also give us a synthetic overview on different terms:

Corporate entrepreneurship
organizational creation, renewal or innovation
+ instigated by an existing organizational entity

Innovation
introduction of something new to marketplace
+ potential to transform competitive environment and organization
+ usually occurring in concert with corporate venturing or strategic renewal

Internal corporate venturing
organizational creation
+ instigated by an existing organizational entity
+ treated as new businesses
+ reside within existing organizational domain [2]

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Bibliographical references:

[1] Corporate entrepreneurship and the pursuit of competitive advantage
Jeffrey G. Covin, Morgan P. Miles, In: Entrepreneurship theory and practice, 1999

[2] Toward a reconciliation of the definitional issues in the field of Corporate Entrepreneurship
Pramodita Sharma, James J. Chrisman, In: Entrepreneurship theory and practice, 1999

NEWS: Google IPO

Waouw, it's time for IPO. Let's have a look at the Google's annoucement itself or an ABC newsonline article - Google files for share offer. Because of the SEC's document, we know now a little more about the financial situation of the company, which is, as expected, quite good :-)

Expected stock raising: $US 2.7 billion

Figures 2003

- Revenues: $US 961.9 miliion
- Net profit: $US 105.6 million

Figures Q1 2004

- Revenues: $US 389.6 million
- Net profit: 63.9 million

Available cash: $US 454 million

Umh, not a bad situation ;-)

BUSINESS: Corporate Entrepreneurship (02) - Definitions part I

The terminology in the fields of corporate entrepreneurship and innovation could be confusing. Thus it seems to be necessary to first review some of the definitions used and to present some basic structures in these fields.

Sharma and Chrisman present an overview of the different definitions in the field of entrepreneurship:

A variety of terms are used for the entrepreneurial efforts within an existing organization such as corporate entrepreneurship (Burgelman, 1983 ; Zahra, 1993), corporate venturing (Biggadike, 1979), intrepreneuring (Pinchot, 1985), internal corporate entrepreneurship (Jones & Butler, 1992), internal entrepreneurship (Schollhammer, 1982 ; Vesper, 1984), strategic renewal (Guth & Ginsberg, 1990) and venturing (Hornsby, Naffziger, Kuratko & Montagno, 1993).

Entrepreneurship encompasses acts of organizational creation, renewal or innovation that occur within or outside an existing organization.
Entrepreneurs are individuals or groups of individuals, acting independently or as part of a corporate system, who create new organizations, or instigate renewal or innovation within an existing organization. [1]

Burgelman, in his work, also proposes a definition of Entrepreneurship:

Corporate entrepreneurship refers to the process whereby firms engage in diversification through internal development. Such diversification requires new resource combinations to extend the firm’s activities in areas unrelated or marginally related to its current domain of competence and corresponding opportunity set. [2]

This definition can be compared with the one proposed by Sharma & Chrisman:

Corporate entrepreneurship is the process whereby an individual or a group of individuals in association with existing organization, create a new organization or instigate renewal or innovation within that organization. [1]

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Bibliographical references:

[1] Toward a reconciliation of the definitional issues in the field of Corporate Entrepreneurship
Pramodita Sharma, James J. Chrisman, In: Entrepreneurship theory and practice, 1999

[2] Corporate entrepreneurship and strategic management: insights from a process study
Robert A. Burgelman, In: Management Science, 1983

BUSINESS: Corporate Entrepreneurship (01)

I will post differents articles about Corporate Entrepreneurship in the next days. I think it's the right time, some of you know what I mean ;-) These posts will be based on quotations from a marvelous book written by Bartlett and Ghoshal (I published a blog about the death of Ghoshal some days ago), called The Individualized Corporation: A Fundamentally New Approach to Management.



As usual, we will begin with some definitions about Corporate Entrepreneurship. You will see, not so easy to define this notion :-) We will then discuss some thoughts from Jack Welch (and his vision) about Corporate Entrepreneurship by General Electric. The third part will be dedicated to innovation and Corporate Entrepreneurship by 3M. And we will conclude with general ideas from Bartlett and Ghoshal about Corporate Entrepreneurship.

BUSINESS: what is the real added value of eCommerce for consumers?

A recent article of the New York Times (free online registration) - Choice trumps price on Internet - points out that the real added value of Internet for the consumers is not only, as expected, a lower price (average of 6 to 16%), but more a question of selection. In this field, selection means a bigger amount of product choices. For example, Wal-mart offers online 6 times more products than its biggest "real" store (!).

This paper is based on a study from Erik Brynjolfsson of the Sloan School of Management at MIT. He is, among other things, Director of the MIT Center for eBusiness. I must say, I like very much the slogan of the Center for eBusiness: "eBusiness is Business". One of the logo from the eCenter, the unit I'm responsible for by the Helvetia Patria Group, looks like this:



About the same vision :-)

BLOG: new URL

I'm sorry but I have changed my blog "entry point". From now, you can find my weblog under:

http://www.didierbeck.com

BLOG: disclaimer

I'm blogging since about two months, without having any disclaimer, which is definitely not a good idea ;-) So please find below my disclaimer:

----------------
My name is Didier Beck and I am working for the Helvetia Patria Holding. The views expressed on this weblog are mine alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of my employer. Everything here, though, is my personal opinion and is not read or approved before it is posted. No warranties or other guarantees will be offered as to the quality of the opinions or anything else offered here.
----------------

NEWS: company's blogging

A quite interesting article from FastCompany about companies' blogging:

blog as support for knowledge management

employees blogging

blogging as a marketing and branding support

If you are interested in, some valuable comments ;-)

TOOLS: blogkomm v1.7 released

Holger released the internationalized version 1.7 of its blogkomm tool. I'm using it for my blog to be able to add comments to "normal" blogger posts. Very easy to use und fully flexible in the field of the GUI customization.

Great tool for all blogger users :-)

NEWS: the program of the Montreux Jazz Festival 2004 is out!

If you like all kind of good music (blues, jazz, rock, etc.), you perhaps have heard something about this so great Montreux Jazz Festival. You can find the program 2004 here (pdf).

A great experience!

I also like very much (as usual ;-) the new poster (pdf):

NEWS: about Google's infrastructure

If you are interested in some discussions and assumptions about the infrastructure of Google and its massive grid cheap computers, let's read the following article from the MIT Technology Review.

It seems that Google is hidding its real numbers concerning its incredible infrastructure and that the way Google is operating its infrastructure and the quite innovative approach concerning this grid computing are perhaps more relevant as THE competitive advantage of Google than the different search algorithms.

TOOLS: Gmail beta

I managed to get in the beta program of Gmail of Google ;-)

A lot of (partly completely crazy) things were written about this. Anyway, I'm now trying this new email system quite a lot, to be able to really talk about Gmail. Stay tuned for more information.

My Gmail: didier DOT beck AT gmail DOT com

TOOLS: new version of Skype is out

Skype released a new version of his so great P2P phone (VoIP) tool yesterday:

=> Skype v0.97.0.40

NEWS: interview with Ray Ozzie

Thomas Claburn interviewed Ray Ozzie, the founder of Groove and creator of Lotus Notes, for InformationWeek on April, 12. The discussion was about different items:

the version 3 of Groove, which should be the "maturity" version of Groove (performance, usability, completeness, file-sharing workspace)

collaborative softwares and their business requests

security

the importance of the P2P technology in the Groove architecture and generally speaking

...Skype ;-)

As usual with Ozzie, some very valuable comments!

BUSINESS: MySQL positioning

Some days ago, news.com published an interesting article about MySQL, the Swedish GNU-licensed database system. We are using this DB in the eBusiness Center (pdf) where I'm working, not in a productive environment (without any surprise, we use Oracle ;-), but as a local DB for the developers.

Our usage of MySQL seems to represent actually the strategic positioning of this product in the market, i.e. MySQL is trying to sell its product as an easy-to-use but professional and scalable database. This role was in the past played by Microsoft SqlServer, which is now becoming more and more a direct competitor of Oracle and IBM DB2. Consequently, the MS product is also becoming more and more complexe and expensive. Microsoft leaves this niche market, I mean the market for test, development and small productive environment, which requests less functionality than the ones you can find in Oracle, DB2 or SqlServer.

MySql is a good, performant and reliable database with a reduced set of functionalities, which are just ok for a lot of usages... The product works with a GNU-license, the support fees are really reasonable. It is also interesting to mention that MySQL is developping the product by its own, I mean they do not use the open-souce developers community. This is clearly a way for them to have the product development and technology-orientation under control. MySQL owns all the rights of its code.

BLOG: on heavy rotation

I recently bought the last DVD live of Placebo called Soulmates never die – Live in Paris 2003.



It's really a great and amazing DVD, incredible band, that's fucking rock & roll!!
Frank Black appears on the last track, a famous cover from the Pixies called Where is my mind.

TOOLS: newsgator

Based on an advice of Laurent, I'm now testing newsgator, which is at the same time a news agregator and a blog publishing tool (this post is realized in newsgator). What's really cool is that this tool is completely integrated in Outlook and has a publishing plug-in for blogger. Other ones already exist for Radio, .Text, MovablePoster, etc. (see here for the complete list).

First impression: the agregator part is well integrated in Outlook and very easy to set-up. The publishing part seems to be ok! I will use this tool for a while, stay tuned for more information in some days!

Second impression (after the first publishing): I have to check some details about the post process, specially the formatting and title parts ;-)

BUSINESS: managers who just complain all the time....

As promised, I would like to write down some thoughts about an article - Reclaim your job - from S. Ghoshal and H. Bruch published in the Harvard Business Review from March 2004.

I like this article because it talks about the so-called managers (uhm, have you noticed - manager - not leader ;-) who just complain all the time about:

lack of time

lack of resources

lack of opportunity

lack of control

lack of influence possibilities

lack of freedom

I am sure that you also meet regularly this kind of managers ;-) Bruch and Ghoshal made a quite impressive analyse about these points and found out, as expected, that....these are just excuses! This kind of boring reaction is mainly due to a lack of self-confidence and/or inhibition due to risks.

On the opposite, the two authors tried to identify which are the most important elements to be able to reach some success, instead of loosing time, focus and energy by complaining all the time. Three blocks crystallized:

deal with demands:

- have our tasks under control and to manage the expectations of our stakeholders
- proactivity (acting, instead of re-acting mindset)
- go away from the desire to be indispensable
- busy to effective work
- learn to say simply "no"

generate resources:

- try to find new way to receive resources (money, people, mgmt attention, etc.)
- out-of-the-box, no can't do mindset
- no limitation, break the rules
- choose a patient, methodical, out-of-the-box approach

recognize and exploit alternatives

- understand well the corporate strategy
- present alternatives to serve it efficiently
- base = strong expertise in a specific field

Waou, I find this framework really interesting and reproductible based on by own experience.

BUSINESS: Sumantra Ghoshal died unexpectedly on March 3rd 2004....

We all have lost one of the major out-of-the-box thinker in the field of strategic leadership, I mean Mr. Sumantra Ghoshal, who died unexpectedly on March 3rd 2004.....
I was preparing a blog concerning his last great article in the Harvard Business Review from March 2004, co-authored with Heike Bruch, Reclaim your job, when I found this painful information on the Harvard Business Review's web site.

Do you know Sumantra Ghoshal? I personaly really like this guy and you HAVE to read at least two of his books, both co-authored with Christopher Bartlett:
- Managing Across Borders: The Transnational Solution
- The Individualized Corporation: A fundamentally new approach to Management.

I will publish my blog concerning the mentionned article in a few days.

TOOLS: Google Web Alerts

Another "useful" Google's tool (in beta). It gives you the possibility to monitor specifics Google searches by sending you an email alert each time the results are different. Very easy to use (web interface).

You can register your searches here.

BLOG: on heavy rotation

Since some weeks, I'm listenning to and watching the following Red Hot Chili Peppers' DVD:



Red Hot Chili Peppers - Live at Slade Castle

It's really one of the best live I ever heard! Great sound, high video and effects quality. These guys are definitely crazy :-)
Specially the bass player with his skeleton costume. A must-have.

NEWS: "Who should govern the Net?"

An interesting interview of Vint Cerf for CNET news.com -Vint is the current Chairman of the ICANN and one of the fathers of Internet. It's about domain names and addresses, the architecture of Internet, ICANN itself, United Nations' and Internet. A must-read!

Didier's homepage & Weblog

After one active month, a good rank with the Yahoo's search ;-)

Let's try this, i.e. a search with the keyword "didier" and "beck" with Yahoo.com.

BUSINESS: P2P is NOT destroying the CDs' business!

Two researchers, F. Oberholzer from Harvard and K. Strumpf from the University of North Carolina, published recently a Harvard Business School study about the music companies' allegation that the Internet file sharing is responsible for the drastic reduction in sales. They proved that this connection simply doesn't exist!!

"Downloads have an effect on sales which is statistically indistinguishable from zero, despite rather precise estimates. Moreover, these estimates are of moderate economic significance and are inconsistent with claims that file sharing is the primary reason for the recent decline in music sales."

BLOG: 1st of April

:-)



thx to vowe for the link.