Corporate Explorer

8Explore Business System

The twenty-first century startup has access to more capital than ever before and, thanks to software-as-a-service platforms, has narrowed the technology gap between startups and corporations.¹ Even so, Corporate Explorers have a head start on entrepreneurs in the breadth of assets available to them. They have customers, financial resources, manufacturing, customer services, technical expertise, and so on. Making these advantages count is critical. It is a key reason for believing that Corporate Explorers are a more effective way for established companies to pursue disruptive innovation than the available alternatives.

We have described in previous chapters how LexisNexis, Deloitte, RBI, and others used the customers, capabilities, and capacities of its core business to accelerate the performance of the Corporate Explorer. These are examples of success. Many others floundered, forced to dance to the tune of a larger, dominant sibling, with many rules and restrictions. This is tough stuff. You are trying to create an interface between two contradictory logics – the core and explore, short term and long term, known markets and unknown, emerging ones. We have no magic formula to make it work perfectly. One recipe that will not work is to rely on the good will of managers in the core to “do the right thing.” This is classic bad-intentions fallacy. Core business managers do not have malevolent motives for failing to support innovation. They are following ...