TEACHING & LEARNING
Venturing Forth
Working Out Without
Breaking a Sweat
PLUS:A
Photo Gallery from the Boot Camp
OUTREACH
Connecting
24/7
Faces of Wharton Entrepreneurship
RESEARCH
Doing Bobby Fischer One Better
Teaching
Venturing Forth
A new Executive Education course is teaching the value of intelligent innovation.
Stereotype: Big companies are stodgy, lumbering and not as capable of cutting-edge innovation as nimble startups. The personal computer, after all, was created in Steve Jobs' parents' garage.
Reality: Plenty of innovations, from the photocopier to Prozac, were born of behemoths.
All innovators, whether working in startups or Fortune 500 companies, have what Ian "Mac" MacMillan, Director of Wharton's Sol C. Snider Entrepreneurial Research Center, calls "an entrepreneurial mindset." In fact, MacMillan limned the habits of successful entrepreneurs in his book of the same name.
Those with an entrepreneurial mindset are unafraid of uncertainty and change. They see simplicity where others are cowed by complexity. They find solutions that are "roughly right" and move ahead, rather than being stymied by the paralysis of analysis.
MacMillan's new five-day course, offered by Wharton's Executive Education division and called Business Building: Conceiving, Planning and Executing Corporate Ventures helps executives from established companies of all sorts and sizes embrace this sort of thinking — or, rather, this sort of doing.
"One of the cries you hear is, ‘We don't know. We don't know,'" says James Thompson, one of the instructors and associate director of Wharton Entrepreneurial Programs. "Well, life's full of uncertainty. What we've put together is a framework that embraces uncertainty. We've found a way, based on Mac's research, to value uncertainty and cap the downside risk. We want the students to see that you can manage uncertainty."
One of the requirements of the course, taught for the first time in April, is that executives come to the program with a real work problem that they need to solve. In the evenings, they're encouraged to try to apply what they are learned during the day to that problem. "They leave not only having listened but also having done," Thompson says.
A student might be part of a team at a chemical company that's looking for applications for a new material. Or he (or she) might be an executive at a financial-services company that's trying to launch a new product or new suite of products.
Dani Cao, a marketing specialist with Air Products and Chemicals Inc., says the emphasis on application was one of the best features of the course. "The next day, we could ask questions about what we tried to apply the night before." Cao also liked that MacMillan "doesn't just teach you how to evaluate new ideas but how to improve existing lines of business."
That's very much the goal of the course,
Thompson says.
"The class is about growing profits, not revenues, and it's for anybody
involved in venturing who wants techniques for embracing uncertainty
and managing through it," he explains. "It not only exposes participants
to the latest theory in venturing but also gives them tools and frameworks to
use on
their own problems."
The foundation of
the course is what Thompson calls "incremental-investment
based on learning." The instructors show students how
to foster creativity during the early stages of the execution
of a venture, so they don't squander
cash while still learning. "We want to show them that
there are ways to spend your imagination, not your cash."
When Christopher Serroels of CH2M HILL, an engineering services
company, completed the course, he was eager to share with
his colleagues some
of the concepts
he learned. "I've been actively promoting these
ideas," he says. "They
are simple yet powerful mechanisms to screen many different
aspects of our business — new ventures as well as other areas."
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
For more information: Business Building: Conceiving, Planning and Executing Corporate Ventures, Sep 14–Sep 19.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .