Latest Thinking on Corporate Entrepreneurship

As is mentioned in the Adam Grant book “Think Again,” if we don’t look back at ourselves a year ago and say, “Wow, I understand that topic so much better today than I did a year ago,” then we are not learning fast enough.

One of those topics we are learning more about each day in is Corporate Entrepreneurship. It is very complicated and gigantically important. There is also a great deal of performative art on the subject and not nearly enough discipline and systematic knowledge at the current time.

In 2019 and 2020, I had the good fortune to teach a class with Elaine Chen (formerly EIR at the Trust Center and now Professor and head of entrepreneurship education at Tufts University) and longtime friend Sue Siegel (most recently the Chief Innovation Officer of GE as well as CEO of GE Ventures).

This set the foundation of knowledge that we built off for the Corporate Innovation course for this spring (2021). Trust Center EIR and MIT Sloan Lecturer Carly Chase took the lead on this year’s course and helped raise it to a whole new level.

Each week we talk about our experiences, hypotheses, and frameworks to improve corporate innovation and entrepreneurship with a very senior group of students at MIT Sloan – many of whom are Executive MBAs with critical executive operating roles in the area of innovation in their respective organizations. They keep the conversation real and current.

We all, faculty and students, look forward to the class because it is so conversational and everyone has deep experience and thoughtful opinions on how this very important challenge. With each class, everyone leaves better informed and inspired that it is possible and how it should best be implemented. It is a classic case where the collective wisdom of the group is greater than anyone individual and by sharing, we all gain.

I am happy to share with the broader community who can’t come to the class each week some of the material coming out of this course (it will always be improving and evolving so it is not a finished product) right now. I discuss one of the classes in a series our Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship is doing with old friend and great Spanish entrepreneur Alberto Rodriguez de Lama called “The Radical Sessions” put on by The Cube. I also must note the great help that Andrés Haddad Di Marco and his team have provided to make this possible.

I will warn you upfront that this is a bit long (the total video is 53 minutes with the Q&A) but that is what is needed to seriously deal with this complicated topic – and this is only one part of it. In this talk, we step back and apply lessons learned from Startup-oriented Disciplined Entrepreneurship to a Corporate Environment (which could be any large organization – public, private, academic, government, etc.) to increase your odds of success.

There is so much more that still needs to be done and hopefully, we will look back next year and see how much further we have come to understand and make concrete frameworks to help large organizations become more entrepreneurial and innovative.