Understanding Corporate Entrepreneurship and Development: A Practitioner View of Organizational Intrapreneurship

Miles, Miles and Snow claim that to an outsider the network can appear to be uncontrolled, even chaotic at times. But viewed from the inside, it is actually a shifting collection of talent applied to a free-flowing stream of ideas. Both small and large member firms group and regroup as needed to bring products and services to an array of markets that is constantly expanding. The entire network is a continuous search engine with the capacity to not only design and place a product anywhere in the world, but to quickly find a way to modify it to make it more useful. The firm that originally designed the product may have little if anything to do with its final form or price, but it is confident that it will receive full internal recognition and an equitable financial return. One can't manage this type of operation centrally or even regionally. It's up to the member firms to collectively manage their own interactions.

Most organizations stifle innovation by forcing it into specific product or service channels - every invention or improvement has to target a specific market. At successful organizations, every firm has a standing invitation to adapt any new idea to its own market or to collaborate with another firm, inside or outside the network, to fit it to a jointly developed new market segment. Because everyone knows that ideas are "generative" rather than competitive, people share ideas across firms, and often innovation seems to breed more as stated by Miles, Miles and Snow. What the authors have tried to build is a work environment in which people are just as concerned with other people's recognition and rewards as they are with their own. While this sounds idealistic, collaborative behavior can be taught and learned just like competitive behavior is taught and learned. Of course, it is a fact that jointly developed ideas are more powerful than individual ideas. As much as possible, experts want entrepreneurial leaders to give credit to their colleagues where appropriate, and they try to explicitly show and communicate how each firm has contributed to a new product at every point along the way. Frequently, a new product or service idea has much greater potential return than is apparent from its immediate application. But such returns usually cannot be identified unless their partner firms trust each other and explore the possible benefits of the new idea together. Lastly, even though the firms in their global network offer highly competitive salaries and benefits based on local market conditions, no individual is going to get rich simply by receiving his or her paycheck. Everybody has to be entrepreneurial - to come up with new ideas and to work with other member firms to find customers to buy the new products and services. Each new project is almost like starting a new business - except that the organization and other resources are already in place waiting to be configured and activated. And when the new business eventually begins to pay off, everybody who has been involved must share the rewards equitably."