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

Philip Anderson
INSEAD Alumni Fund Professor of Entrepreneurship at INSEAD, in Singapore.
He is also director of the 3i Venture lab.

smartest person to launch a corporate venture. You need a general manager who has a track record of building new organizations.

• Many a time, very high potential ventures fail to take off for want of funding. How to plan for new venture funding?
  Entrepreneurs in modern India tell me this is one of the least of their worries. India is awash with money to back good venture ideas. The key is to find investors who bring more than money to the table and whose interests are aligned with yours. The most common mistake I have seen in India occurs when an entrepreneur takes money to get a venture off the ground only to find out that the investor has a much shorter term horizon and wants very quick exit at a high multiple. If thats not the kind of company you are building, thats not the kind of investor you should have on board.

• What are the challenges facing implementation of effective and exemplary corporate entrepreneurship programs?
  There is a bit of a chicken and egg problem. Because most seldom start new business units, they dont have a talent pool of people who have experience in building a new organization. One way around that is to plan the career path of some promising executives so they get that experience, for example, by opening a new office abroad. Another is to cultivate a talent pool outside the company (e.g. among vendors or third parties who work with your firm) of people who can be hired and start contributing immediately when you form a new business unit.

• How should companies go about fostering an entrepreneurial culture with commercially engaging potential?
  Most corporations have highly developed mechanisms for killing ideas by proving that they cannot work. Most ventures seem unsound at the outset; there arent enough PowerPoint slides in the world to demonstrate by logic alone that a risky idea will pay off. Develop simple, low cost mechanisms for trying out new ideas in the marketplace (perhaps with or through third parties), so that the voice of the market can tell you whether or not they have promise. If the only way to fund the trial of an idea is through a political/persuasion process, you will never have enough entrepreneurship inside your company. Provide innovators with simple, fast, cheap ways to give an idea a go.

• What is the role of leadership / top management in creating businesses within a business?
  Leaders create a climate within which people search for new opportunities, usually because the companys ambitions exceed what is possible simply by growing todays businesses. They cultivate the kind of talent needed to seed a new line of business far in advance of when they actually need it. They motivate people to try great things and convey trust that failures will not be punished too severely as long as the problem wasnt poor execution. Leaders protect and nurture fledgling new lines of business, understanding that internal rivalry and jealousy are natural and kill a lot of promising growth opportunities.

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