Overview of the Consortium for Corporate Entrepreneurship
- Peter Koen
- May 3, 2024
- 1 min read
A Research Directorate, which is part of the Stevens School of Business Stevens Institute of Technology
Mission:
To significantly increase the success of transformational businesses, products, processes and service through an evidence-based approach.
Transformational innovations
Transformational innovations reframe existing categories and build on the competencies, channels and brands of the existing organization. Examples are Apple’s iPod bundled with iTunes and Crest’s white strips which brought teeth whitening out of the dental office directly to the consumer. This contrasts with sustaining innovations which are incremental improvements to existing products. The consortium focuses its efforts on evidence-based studies.
History:
The consortium was founded by Ethicon (a division of Johnson and Johnson) and ExxonMobil in 1998.
Activities:
Symposiums:
The consortium typically conducts two symposiums a year which bring in leading academics and consultants on state-of-the-art topics. Each consortium meeting consists of two parts: knowledge sharing among companies on topical areas and an in-depth discussion on the meeting topic facilitated by the invited consultants who are pioneers or leading thinkers on the topic. Examples since 2020 are indicated below:
Oct 2020: Business Model Hypothesis Testing
The objective of this symposium is to focus on how to do better and more rigorous hypothesis testing when employing lean startup methodology which is a hypothesis driven methodology which favors experimenting over planning.
Consultants: Arnaldo Camuffo Professor of Business Organization and Alfonso Gambardella, Professor of Corporate Management both from Bocconi University, in Milan, Italy. Published one of the first studies showing the importance of developing rigorous hypothesis as part of the lean start-up approach.
May 2021: Best Practices for Testing and Experimentation in Transformational Innovations
This symposium focused on how to more rigorously apply hypothesis and experimentation methodology when incubating and scaling a new transformational innovation.
Consultant: Stefan Thomke, Professor at the Harvard School of Business is a widely published author with over 100 hundred articles and widely considered to be premier expert in innovation experimentation methodology.
Oct 2021: Implications of Navigating a Major Disruption such as COVID-19
This symposium was focused on the innovation and business model implications of how companies navigate through a major disruption.
Consultant: Professor Stelios at the Judge School of Business in Cambridge. One of the few faculty who has done evidence-based studies in this area and has published several case studies on the topic.
Feb & March 2022: Portfolio Management Strategy Tools and Techniques for Transformational Innovations
This symposium is focused on how to manage the portfolio of high-risk transformational innovations in large companies A well- balanced portfolio of potentially successful projects and platforms is necessary to be able to generate a steady stream of transformational innovations. Unfortunately, there is no published research on practices for portfolio management except in the pharmaceutical area.
We sought advice from two leading consultants in the area. David Matheson, who is confounder of Smart Org, has been working as a consultant in portfolio for almost two decades. The second consultant, Julian Birkinshaw, a Professor at the London School of Business, is a recognized thought leader in understanding the development of future transformational and disruptive innovation strategies.
Nov 2022: Organizational Readiness for Transformational Innovation
The objective of this symposium is to focus on creating organizational readiness and understanding for adopting an ambidextrous organization. Considerable research into why large organizations fail to successfully implement transformational innovations has been done since Clay Christensen published his landmark book in 2003. However, the C-suite in the divisions of most large companies, despite significant advances in our understanding of transformational innovation remain unsuccessful in guiding their company through a repeatable strategy and process that consistently delivers a stream of transformational innovations year after year which have significant impact on income.
Consultant: Andy Binns is managing director and co-founder of Change Logic, a Boston-based strategic advisory firm. He works with CEOs, boards, and senior teams as they lead significant business change. Andy has 25 years of consulting experience as both an external and internal consultant for McKinsey & Co., the IBM Corporation, and Change Logic. He is the lead author of the new book Corporate Explorer: how corporations beat startups at the innovation game.
May 2023: Team Creation and Formation During the Different Stages (Ideation, Incubation and Scaling) of the transformational Innovation Process
This symposium brought together both a practitioner and academic perspective. Basadur Applied Innovation provided a practitioner combined with their unique methodology to separate people into four unique innovation styles: generators (find new problems and ideate), conceptualizers (define the problem and understand it through abstract analysis); optimizers (evaluate ideas and solutions) and implementers (put solutions to work.) On the second day Gilad Chen brought together nascent research from multiples academics based on evidence-based studies on the best practices of forming transformational teams.
Consultants: Tim Basadur is an innovation trainer and process leader with over 25 years’ experience delivering and leading applied creativity projects for corporate clients as part of Basadur Applied Innovation. Gilad Chen, Robert Smith Chair in Organizational Behavior at the Robert Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland, has been involved in team research over the last two decades.
Nov 2023: Implementing Transformational Innovation – State of the Art I
Understanding the challenges of implementing transformational innovations close to the core in large companies This symposium, led by Rory McDonald (bio attached), will focus on the latest research on how organizations drive new growth by successfully navigating new markets, new business models and new product categories. Rory focused on four different topics: Organizing for Transformational Innovation, Escaping Bounded Rationality, Creating New Categories through Business Model Innovation and Understanding New Transformational Innovations Close to the Core.
Consultant: Rory McDonald is the Thai-Hi T. Lee (MBA 1985) Associate Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School. His research focuses on how firms compete and innovate effectively in new technology-enabled markets. Drawing on a mix of in-depth fieldwork and archival data, he studies how executives develop viable strategies in these contexts and how they obtain resources that improve their chances of success.
Research:
On topics of interest which help inform the consortium as to who are the key informants and trends of cutting-edge topic.
Front End of Innovation (FEI) skills and activities that a company needs to achieve robust growth and sustained profitability.
Research resulted in five peer reviewed articles, with over 2200 citations, which helped identify the front end of innovation as a critical part of the innovation process. This work also helped establish the popular FEI practitioner conference which is now in its 18th year.
Completed.
Business Model Innovation Outside the Core. Why is it so difficult for large successful companies?
This research results in two peer reviewed articles, with over 250 citations, which helped to determine the critical importance of new business models in transformational innovation. Completed.
Creating prodigious innovators through network analysis.
Having an effective network is more powerful in both creativity and innovation than the innovativeness of a lone genius. The purpose of this project is to develop metrics and diagrams which can determine the actual collaboration networks that exist at ExxonMobil. And then use these metrices as outcome measures to help improve creativity and innovation.
Completed.
Determining how to effectively apply lean startup methods in large enterprises.
Lean Start-Up is a new process for product development, which is suitable for developing products when there is high uncertainty in the market and/or technology – characteristics which typically occur in transformational and innovations. The purpose of this research is to learn how lean start-up is actually being used in large companies.
Completed.
Leadership Challenge in Transformational Innovation in Large Incumbent Firms.
This research is focused on determining, through an evidenced based management research approach , the ideal strategy, tools, metrics and learning so that the senior management team of a strategic business unit in a large company can become more adept at creating a long-term repeatable trajectory of successful transformational innovations.
Articles being written.
Understanding the use of Generative AI in Innovation.
The is a new research direction. Overall, I believe that GenAI can be even more impactful on innovation than the internet. In I am interested in doing a prospective study on the use of GenAI in Innovation in large incumbent firms. I am thinking of getting access to five companies and following them over the next several years in how GenAI is being implemented, and its outcomes in innovation process. My vision is to form a cross-industry working group where findings and best practices could be shared.
Knowledge Dissemination:
The director of the consortium, Professor Peter Koen, has developed three separate workshops which bring together the learning from over two decades of research done external to the consortium, funded by the consortium and learned in the consortium symposiums on 1) Understanding the front end in sustaining, transformational and disruptive innovations and 2) understanding how to apply lean startup principles to actual transformational innovations in large corporations.
Consortium Director: Peter Koen
Peter Koen is an Associate Professor in the Stevens Institute School of Business. Peter has also extensively published articles on the front end and founded the popular practitioner front end conference – which is now in its 19th year in the US and coined the term FEI. In addition, he teaches courses on Human Centered Design and Corporate Entrepreneurship. He has 19 years of industrial experience. His academic background includes a BS and MS in ME from NYU and a Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering from Drexel University. peter.koen@stevens.edu
Comments