As we explore the fundamentals of corporate entrepreneurship we're going to look at some key enablers. And talk about some philosophies for how to practice corporate entrepreneurship successfully. So the general premise of our course is, how do you enable employees to be entrepreneurial? Well, we think you get there through five ways. The first step is to help cultivate their entrepreneurial mindset. Their entrepreneurial motivations. Their entrepreneurial behaviors. The second step is to enable them to see entrepreneurial opportunities in industries and markets that you may you already be within. Or that you may enter to champion these activities, to champion entrepreneurial actions. To provide a measure of encouragement and support within the company and from senior leadership. And also,to offer a measure of reinsurance and that it's okay to innovate. That it's okay to fail and what does that mean in practice, are some elements that we'll explore as well. So, this final element of judgement, of consequence is, something that is particularly important in corporate entrepreneurship and innovation. A recent survey by Ernst and Young, that surveyed winners of their Entrepreneur of the Year awards. Found that the vast majority, 82%, strongly agreed that the ability to innovate was critical to the growth of the organizations. And that managing this aspect of consequence or retribution. If innovation doesn't succeed, is a key hurdle to being innovative within a corporate setting. Now, we would recognize and expect that experimentation and agility certainly helps creativity. And the other side of the coin is, that you need to accommodate failure as part of that. So with both large companies, they're fairly rigid. They're fairly hierarchical. There are six or eight or ten levels and structures and managers and assistant directors. And associate directors and directors and senior directors and just a long line of titles and responsibilities. That may not necessarily lend themselves to true entrepreneurship and innovation. They may stifle entrepreneurial spirits. They may impede a level of innovation. They may impede the flow of ideas. Not only down through the structure, but up through the structure, so we'll talk about some of these contexts as well. By analogy, we can look at software development, and the way that corporations All organizations used to build software. There was generally a starting point that was some initial specifications. Then you would then build it. You would review it. You would so some quality control, quality assurance, and get some feedback. Then you would approve it and you would release it and this would take awhile. And this would be typically under the aim of having a perfect product. Or a product that had all the features that you thought the market will want. Now, there were a few consequences of this. It might take a long time to get a new product to market. It might be very expensive. Competitors might beat you there or you may have released something that your customer doesn't want or they're not willing to pay for. And you spend a long time building something with 20 features and they may only care about five. And they may only want to pay for four, but you've tried to sell them 20 and you may or may not have succeeded in that. And there are other reasons that we've shifted away from that and moved in many contexts, to agile development. Agile development of software, or agile development in products and what that means is, it's a lot more inertive. There's a lot more integration and testing along the way. It's a lot more versions that might be released into the market incrementally. Or you may find that after you get feedback from customers or potential customers, that that's not the product to release yet. And there's some element of adjusting and tracking and iteration that needs to happen. Well, it's kind of this context of experimentation and agility that we would challenge corporations. At least those corporations that want to be entrepreneurial. To think about and more of their operations and not only solve for a development, of how do you iterate? How do you get frequent feedback? How do you release versions of things? And it's not only product and service-based things, it might be policies and protocols within the organization as well. But how do you experiment? How do you practice creativity within the organization? And it's with that premise and with that philosophy, then we believe that organizations and large corporations have a unique advantage to startups. They posses typically a lot more resources than startups. Large corporations and organizations have tremendous talent pools, thousands, tens of thousands. In some cases, over 100,000 employees that can supply and act on entrepreneurial opportunities if given the opportunity. We also see that there's the opportunity to seek benefit from innovations. Not only in new products, but in services and processes, and other avenues as well. And corporations that really consider innovation to be important. Need to think about their entrepreneurial structures and how that may enable or impede innovation. An entrepreneurial environment is certainly necessary to foster corporate entrepreneurship. And building some structures to facilitate and support Entrepreneurship can happen. And we're going to really focus our course in three segments as we look at the subsequent modules of thinking entrepreneurially. Of seeing entrepreneurially and of acting entrepreneurially.
