| | By Mick James
With 2011 shaping up
to be another tough
year, the question on
everyone’s lips is where
is the growth going to
come from that will
rebalance both the books
and the economy?
For Founder and
Director of
Market Gravity Gideon
Hyde the answer is
clear—reawakening the
thirst for corporate
entrepreneurialism that
lies dormant in our
large organisations.
Promoting this idea has
led to the production of
a “business novel,”
Defying Gravity: the
adventures of a
corporate entrepreneur,
as well as the
sponsorship of the UK’s
first awards for
corporate
entrepreneurship last
year. The awards had the
effect of flushing out
corporate entrepreneurs
from a number of
organisations, including
Transport for London
which carried off the
award for the successful
launch of Barclays Cycle
Hire, otherwise known as
the “Boris bikes.”
“We thought we’d try
to hold a mirror up to
the industry and invite
them to come forward so
we could recognise their
achievement in
developing and
delivering growth in
their industries,”
explains Hyde. “After
the awards we could
clearly see that the
things we were doing
were tapping into
something real.”
Hyde is very clear
that their “agenda is
growth”—Market Gravity
isn’t an ideas shop or
an innovation factory.
Innovation within
companies comes in a
number of forms—some are
known for it culturally,
others take more behind-
the-scenes approach,
some systematize it and
still others are more
“let a thousand flowers
bloom.”
By focusing on
entrepreneurialism, the
firm felt it was better
placed to help good
ideas to become reality.
One example was working
with British Gas over
its micro-generation
offering:
“That wasn’t
innovative per se, but
it needed an
entrepreneurial
approach,” says Hyde.
“It wasn’t a
breakthrough piece of
thinking but it was
difficult to do,
difficult to organise
how to get the kit into
people’s homes and to
make money out of it.”
Hyde sees the
combination of
creativity and delivery
as the key to | |
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| | facilitating
entrepreneurship:
“It’s the ability to
go from a blank piece of
paper to the early
stages of a business,”
he says. This will often
include staying on in
the business post-launch
in an interim role:
“There’s nothing like
actually delivering a
business plan to help
you realise the
pitfalls.”
By taking an overview
of the entire lifecycle,
Hyde believes he can
help organisations
overcome some of the
bottlenecks and pitfalls
involved in setting up
corporate ventures.
“The challenge is how
to bring out the
organisation’s
collective knowledge and
insight—not just those
people who happen to be
in the room,” he says.
“You need to start with
a broad spectrum of
ideas and opportunities,
so that you’re confident
that you’ve done
everything you can to
identify potential
ideas,” he says. “Then
you drill down to a
dozen big opportunities
to focus on, and then
look at what you can do
near term.”
This process should
lead to one or two
“super business cases,”
each of which can be
pursued in the
confidence that they are
the best of all the
opportunities on offer.
Where most companies
fail is that they start
off with too narrow a
range of initial ideas
and go straight to
launch, or they fail to
qualify the ideas and
get bogged down in a
cycle of endless pilot
schemes.
“The idea is that
after working with us
you will have a growth
pipeline that is
completely validated and
based on informed data,
not guesswork,” says
Hyde. “We can’t
guarantee success but we
can take away a lot of
the risk without
undermining the
opportunity.”
By taking this
step-by-step approach,
the journey looks a lot
less like climbing a
sheer rock face—with
lots of opportunities to
fall off.
“If you go along that
journey not only is the
risk lowered, but it
allows you to get to
places which are
inherently beneficial to
the organisation even if
you don’t proceed any
further.”
In the book Hyde
talks about “venture
death” and the
“naysayers and | |
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| | assassins” who can
derail the corporate
entrepreneur:
“The biggest hurdle
to growth in an
organisation is
cultural; it’s not a
lack of desire or a lack
of clever people,” he
says. “Often the parent
organisation wants to
impose its own
governance structures
onto the new venture,
but a venture is
inherently more
risky—there are
different expectations,
different performance
measures, a different
need for flexibility.”
This means that
managing corporate
entrepreneurship
requires strong
leadership as well as
emotional intelligence:
“You need people who
will go to bat for the
venture and you need to
handle egos and also be
very politically savvy,”
says Hyde. “When you
pick the core team, you
are looking for people
who are not just
motivated by money, you
want to pick the people
who are a little bit
frustrated, who want to
create something new
they can put on their CV
and be proud of it.”
For its part Market
Gravity is also looking
for people to fuel its
growth, which Hyde says
has recently gone
“gangbusters” with the
final quarter in 2010
outpacing the rest of
the year. Currently
basking in a market
presence that belies its
size, the company hopes
to move from 10
full-time consultants to
20 or 25 by the end of
the year.
“What we like are
people who’ve either got
a consultancy background
or do big, interesting
things in industry as
programme managers,
who’ve seen projects
through from start to
finish, so they know
what it’s about,” says
Hyde. “The most
important thing is
attitude; we’re not
looking for eggheads but
for people who can work
with people on a day to
day level.”
So is 2011 the year
for corporate
entrepreneurship to
really take off?
“There’s only so much
efficiency you can eke
out of an organisation,”
says Hyde. “The FTSE 100
companies have made some
saving but they can’t
cut any more people and
they can’t keep on
finding more savings.
The way we approach it
is to look at the market
as a whole and identify
the growth potential for
their business.” | |
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