Pivot: How Top Entrepreneurs Adapt and Change Course to Find Ultimate Success

Chapter 5

Entrepreneur and Corporate Entrepreneur: Framing the Perspectives

In Chapters 5, 8, 13, and 16, we, Professors Gina O'Connor, and Lois Peters, will offer our commentary on the various insights and perspectives provided by Remy and Joanne on the entrepreneur and corporate entrepreneur, respectively.

Let's start with some general thoughts and questions, not necessarily associated with a chapter, yet important for framing these two perspectives.

Are corporate entrepreneurship or individual startups riskier? Which have the higher likelihood of failure?

In the corporate entrepreneurship (CE) world, what prevents pivots?

There is an escalation of commitment through increasing sunk costs, from people taking an overly optimistic stance, and from the planning fallacy of thinking things will take a shorter time than can be reasonably expected. There is a system missing to support CE, with too much reliance on the passion model, a lone champion, and an intrapreneur, as described in the intrapreneurship model in Chapter 3. Commitment is to today's strategy versus an emergent one. Without the right learning mind-set, experiments are conducted that are inherently biased or too narrow. There is a tension between the need to focus and the need for flexibility required of experimentation, and this creates barriers to exploration.

This is an interesting observation because in many ways these are the same factors that derail success of startups, such as the passion model, focus, the immediate ...