Page 169 - ENTREPRENEURSHIP Innovation and entrepreneurship

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162 THE PRACTICE OF ENTREPRENEURSHIP

we have failed. This is particularly true, of course, in the large busi-
ness, but it is true in medium-sized businesses as well, and even in
small businesses.
One reason is that (as said earlier) the existing business always
requires time and effort on the part of the people responsible for it,
and deserves the priority they give it. The new always looks so
puny—so unpromising—next to the reality of the massive, ongoing
business. The existing business, after all, has to nourish the struggling
innovation. But the “crisis” in today’s business has to be attended to
as well. The people responsible for an existing business will therefore
always be tempted to postpone action on anything new, entrepreneur-
ial, or innovative until it is too late. No matter what has been tried—
and we have now been trying every conceivable mechanism for thir-
ty or forty years—existing units have been found to be capable main-
ly of extending, modifying, and adapting what already is in existence.
The new belongs elsewhere.
2. This means also that there has to be a special locus for the new
venture within the organization, and it has to be pretty high up. Even
though the new project, by virtue of its current size, revenues, and
markets, does not rank with existing products, somebody in top man-
agement must have the specific assignment to work on tomorrow as
an entrepreneur and innovator.
This need not be a full-time job; in the smaller business, it very
often cannot be a full-time job. But it needs to be a clearly defined job
and one for which somebody with authority and prestige is fully
accountable. These people will normally also be responsible for the
policies necessary to build entrepreneurship into the existing business,
for the abandonment analysis, for the Business X-Ray, and for devel-
oping the innovation objectives to plug the gap between what can be
expected of the existing products and services and what is needed for
survival and growth of the company. They are also normally charged
with the systematic analysis of innovative opportunities—the analysis
of the innovative opportunities presented in the preceding section of
this book, the Practice of Innovation. They should be further charged
with responsibility for the analysis of the innovative and entrepre-
neurial ideas that come up from the organization, for example, in the
recommended “informal” session with the juniors.
And innovative efforts, especially those aimed at developing new
businesses, products, or services, should normally report directly to this
“executive in charge of innovation” rather than to managers further