Nov. 4, 2009 (Business Wire) -- A new book by two leading experts on innovation from Chicago explores some of the surprising new ways that large companies create innovative new businesses. The book, Grow from Within: Mastering Corporate Entrepreneurship and Innovation, published by McGraw-Hill reflects six years of research and provides a hands-on guide to finding the right approaches.

The authors, Robert C. Wolcott and Michael J. Lippitz, are leading authorities on innovation and corporate entrepreneurship at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University and have worked with scores of large corporations on developing and implementing new business creation capabilities. Their 2006 article on The Four Models of Corporate Entrepreneurship for Sloan Business Review is still one of the site’s most often downloaded.

“If America is to remain competitive, companies of all types and sizes must create internal entrepreneurial capabilities. In an increasingly globalized marketplace, powerful competitors can come from anywhere. Enabling the entrepreneurial capabilities of a company’s people is the most powerful way to survive and thrive in the long run. Grow From Within outlines how leading companies are doing so,” the authors say.

Starting in 2003, the authors studied more than 30 companies across industry sectors and developed an ongoing dialogue with them about corporate entrepreneurship through the Kellogg Innovation Network (KIN). Case studies cited in the book range from consumer packaged goods companies like Kraft and Procter & Gamble and manufacturers like Linde and Computime (Hong Kong) to technology powerhouses like Google and Cisco. The book even explores innovation in government through cases from the U.S. Department of Defense, such as the transformative launch of stealth technology.

The authors found that a number of companies have generated billions of dollars in new revenues and expected their new business creation performance to continue. A few findings from Grow from Within include:

• Companies do not lack good ideas. Rather, the difficult task is to create an organization and processes that refine ideas, build businesses, and bring the best of them to market. Contrary to myth, structure and process are not the enemies of innovation.
• Also contrary to myth, large companies have significant advantages over start-ups when it comes to innovation and building new businesses.
• Innovation should be approached more broadly than inventing new products and services. It is really about new business design, incorporating all aspects of how the company does business, what they sell, to whom, how and where.
• The most successful innovation programs focused on one or two innovation objectives and did them well. They didn’t try to do everything.

The book outlines 12 different ways companies innovate and fits them into a useful design tool, the Innovation Radar. While these include new products and services, they also include creating new customer experiences, reaching new customer segments, capturing additional revenue in innovative ways and creating innovative distribution channels or physical presence.

In addition, the authors have found there is no one-size-fits-all approach to building entrepreneurial capabilities within the corporation, but rather four basic models—opportunist, enabler, advocate and producer—around which companies can design new businesses successfully.

More information is available at www.growfromwithinbook.com.

About the Authors

Robert C. Wolcott is a faculty member of Entrepreneurship & Innovation at the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University. He is co-founder and executive director of the Kellogg Innovation Network (KIN), an organization of senior executives who collaboratively address challenges in innovation-driven growth and performance (www.kinglobal.org), and co-founder of management consultancy, Clareo Partners LLC (www.clareopartners.com).

Michael Lippitz is a senior research associate with the Center for Research in Technology and Innovation at Kellogg and consults to the U.S. Department of Defense and other agencies through the Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA).