Seminar in corporate entrepreneurship

Sessions: 1 session / week, 2.5 hours / session

15.310 Managerial Psychology or 15.311 Organizational Processes.

Large, established companies are under unyielding pressure to discover new ways to grow. For many firms, efficiency improvement, M&A and even incremental innovation have failed to meet the strategic need. In the face of this gap, corporate entrepreneurship is now appearing, often reluctantly, on the executive agenda of executives leading those companies and for people joining those firms or advising them.

Corporate entrepreneurship (CE) has classically been about building new businesses inside established firms—starting new lines of business or new product units, setting up new practice areas, beginning offices in new geographies, managing spinoffs, or creating joint ventures, and establishing firm-level systems and processes to support these efforts. But CE is actually a much more widely applicable. Entrepreneurship is required whenever a firm or individual ventures into any unfamiliar ("far from core") area in which success is significantly uncertain. We will reserve the term for this use to distinguish it from innovation in all its other forms.

The need for CE is painfully clear; how to do it is often poorly understood and managed, and inherently resisted. This course addresses challenges of making an established company entrepreneurial. It will help you prepare for various roles related to corporate entrepreneurship efforts: Working as an individual, managing the "Entrepreneur Inside" (EI), leading a small team trying to build a new business in a company, working as a management consultant advising a client, or leading an entire firm.

We will cover the basics of entrepreneurship in and by corporations in three ways. First, Why entrepreneurship? How does corporate entrepreneurship connect with a firm-level strategy? Second, What challenges will you face? And third, How to become entrepreneurial? What approaches are available to the large firm to create new products and businesses and new internal processes and methods beyond their current area of expertise? And how does the large company acquire, employ, manage and refresh these tools and methods?

We will come at these two issues from the perspective of four stakeholders:

CE itself is a volatile field at present with only modest coherence, at best. Theorists, consultants and practitioners disagree on definitions and methods. Our aim is to give you a roadmap of the territory, not a recipe for success.

Outside speakers supplement faculty lectures.

This course will give you the tools, methods and logic that will enable you to participate in or lead successful efforts in Corporate Entrepreneurship (CE).

By the end of the course you will:

This class can only be taken for a grade. The grading is divided as follows:

The character of the course naturally lends itself to active exchange among participants, thus we encourage, value, and recognize in-class contribution. Effective class participation includes attendance, preparation, and making an active and constructive contribution to the class discussion.

For some classes a required brief pre-class survey will be distributed prior to the class session.

You will as a team of two or three prepare a term paper that will focus on the area of interest to you: Either a contemporary CE tool or method or the use of CE in a particular firm. We are looking forward to a significant and thoughtful original paper-preparation effort, one that could produce a first draft of a publishable managerially interesting piece of work.

In preparation for the final class you will prepare a short reflection (500± words) on your thoughts on your future regarding corporate entrepreneurship.

The teaching assistant is available to conduct individual or group "help" sessions on an occasional basis for any students who might find them useful. Students are encouraged to contact the TA prior to class sessions where materials are reviewed. You should feel free either to approach the teaching assistant or to make an appointment to see the instructors if you have any questions regarding the course or the material.

The course is divided into two main modules designed to cover areas of challenges and best practices for successful business building inside firms. The modules are highly connected. Therefore, while each session is standalone in that it focuses on a specific challenge area and best practice, we will build on previous sessions in each discussion.

The primary text for this class is Burns, P. Corporate Entrepreneurship: Entrepreneurship and Innovation in Large Organizations. Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. ISBN: 9780230304031. [Preview with Google Books]. A supplementary text is Morris, M. H., D. Kuratko, et al. Corporate Entrepreneurship and Innovation. Cengage Learning, 2010. ISBN: 9780538478922. [Preview with Google Books] which duplicates much material in Burns and also covers other topics. However, it is quite expensive and beyond the excerpts listed in the Readings section is unnecessary to purchase for this course.

In order to create a productive learning environment and to ensure mutual respect it is essential that the norms and rules of classroom etiquette and behavior reflect the highest standards. It is also important that these norms be consistently enforced by the faculty across all classes. Although in the final analysis each faculty member is responsible for his or her own classroom, there are significant negative consequences for other faculty and for the School if rules are not consistent and are not enforced. Therefore it is the policy of the MIT Sloan School that

It is expected that faculty will articulate how these rules apply in their class as well as how the rules will be enforced.

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