Executive Interviews: Interview with Gaurab Bhardwaj on Corporate Entrepreneurship
April 2007 - By Dr. Nagendra V Chowdary

Gaurab Bhardwaj
Assistant Professor of strategy and management
Faculty Director of Babson's Executive Education Program,
at Babson College in Massachusetts, US.

promise and risks of not just creating the innovation but also making it succeed in the market.You need management that not only understands and supports the effort but also provides guidance with insightful and tough questions. Third, recognize that failure comes with the territory so how can you prepare and proceed to reduce its chances and avoid the predictable ones. After a failure, do you incorporate the learning in the process? Finally, is the reward system at your company consistent with the kind of innovation and entrepreneurship your company needs?

• How can ventures with the potential to have high strategic impact on the organization be identified? Are there any criteria to weed out those with less potential?
  Ventures with the potential for high impact are those that are consistent with competitive realities, anticipate important needs, and are consistent with a companys vision, goals, and strategies. Surprisingly, companies often do an inadequate job of getting agreement on and communicating the vision, goals, and strategies to the wider organization, and of anticipating and creating the future. CE should not be limited to a select few at the top; it should be company wide because good ideas can come from anywhere and executing ideas well involves everyone across the organization. Communicating and getting agreement on the vision, goals, and strategy in the wider organization is an important means of ensuring that people come up with ventures with the potential for high impact and execute them well to realize the potential. Looking for consistency between the idea and vision, goals, and strategies is one way of weeding out ideas that may not benefit the company. This requires care, however. Rule changing innovations and those that take a company in new directions will appear to lack such a fit as will those that are genuinely bad ideas for the company. Being thoughtful about what the future may hold and what the company should look like years down the road is part of separating the bad from the seemingly bad.

• Should corporate entrepreneurship be given serious consideration at particular points in a companys life cycle, or should it be an on going practice?
  It should be an ongoing effort. Expertise in CE and a culture that supports it are built over time. They cant be switched on and off, so pursuing CE continually is important. Moreover, success can neither be timed nor guaranteed, so you have to pursue multiple CE efforts continually in a corporation knowing that there will be both failures and successes. Pursuing CE only during certain phases of the industry life cycle or when it is urgently needed can be ineffective and damaging.

• Are there any best practices that companies can adopt to make their corporate entrepreneurship initiative more effective?
  There are. I would advocate a few principles in seeking and adopting best practices. One, look beyond your industry as well. Two, look at both successes and failures and try to understand the process behind both. Three, customize the practices to suit your companys circumstances. Dont settle on best practices without questioning and modifying them thoughtfully.

• What happens to the potential of corporate entrepreneurship in family owned run businesses?
  There is often an assumption that family owned/run businesses are more entrepreneurial because they are shielded from the short term profit pressures of the stock market. That is the case only when such businesses are willing to be entrepreneurial not every one is. With such willingness, family ownership and management can allow the firm to take on risks that pay off in the longer term. However, neither family nor public ownership by themselves are assurance of success. A set of conditions and processes are involved in successful CE.

• The journalist Malcolm Gladwell asked rhetorically in The New Yorker magazine, What if Enron failed not in spite of its talent mind set but because of it? What if smart people are overrated? Does this suggest that we must reverse our thinking about the benefits of corporate entrepreneurship?
  Absolutely not. That would be a mistake for two reasons. One, the rhetorical statement confuses correlation with causation. Two, there were many factors involved in the Enron debacle; not just smart people. Companies such as Apple, Google, Reliance, Genentech, and many others that have successfully employed CE have done so with the benefit of smart people. You cannot attribute success or failure to just smart people. Also essential are an organizations policies, processes, rewards, governance, accountability, and other factors. CE is a complex process that cannot be reduced to a single factor like smart people.

• Many times, very high potential ventures fail to take off for want of funding. How should one plan for new venture funding?
  Often, corporate entrepreneurs dont persuasively convey the promise of their venture to others in the corporation either because they have not thought through all the aspects of CE they may be too focused on the innovative idea itself or because the promise and relevance are so obvious to them that they are puzzled that they are not so to others. They need to recognize that others in the organization face different pressures and from their vantage point look at different aspects of the proposal. Persuading and reassuring others of the promise of your venture is critical to gaining continued support. The process is also beneficial to the corporate entrepreneur. Such exchanges are indispensable to refining your ideas and fixing shortcomings. And it is much easier gaining funds when the going is good. This speaks again to the aforesaid points of when CE should be undertaken.

1. Leadership and Entrepreneurship Case Studies
2. ICMR Case Collection
3. Case Study Volumes