Innovation powered by Entrepreneurship

Innovation is powered by entrepreneurial thinkers. The number of entrepreneurship courses nationally has grown from 250 in 1985 to more than 5,000. This is now the hottest degree for the ambitious with dreams of becoming billionaires before age 29. At the Extreme Entrepreneurship Tour, a series of conferences for aspiring young entrepreneurs, hundreds of high school and college kids were feverishly taking notes. The tour, which is only five years old, will attract an estimated 20,000 students this year. All this activity is in response to a critical innovation gap. What is the innovation gap and how can the risks associated with it be mitigated?

Innovation Gap
Reviewing sources of innovation in 25 consumer product categories over 50 years reveals a growing innovation gap. From the 1960s to the 1980s, 64 percent of all major new innovations came from large corporations (more than $1 billion in revenue). During the past two decades, only 16 percent of innovations came from large companies, while 84 percent of them came from startups or small companies.

In corporations, disruptive innovation has always been somewhat serendipitous. Great corporate innovations are rarely planned by senior managers or chief executive officers. To have any chance of finding that next "New Thing," you need entrepreneurial-minded people in the lower- to middle-management ranks pushing the boundaries and challenging the organization. Only now those people are opting out of the corporate experience altogether and getting venture capital funding to compete with the large firms they shun. The resources available to budding entrepreneurs are growing each day. Twenty years ago, there were few role models and fewer resources. Today there is a growing ecosystem of support.

The true benefit of entrepreneurs is that they think in terms of business models and can provide strategic and business planning solutions in addition to clever ideas. Organizations are in critical need of people who have an innovative entrepreneurial spirit and who can contribute a risk taking and failure forward culture.

Are you developing an innovative entrepreneurial spirit inside a large corporation? What success are you having in closing the innovation gap?