The J.P. Allen Blog

New technology and corporate entrepreneurship

Corporate entrepreneurship is the idea that large corporations can overcome their “risk-averse cultures” that “stifle innovation” and learn how to “create, develop, and sustain innovative new businesses”.

I’ve prepared a new executive lecture session on the opportunities offered by new information technology for promoting corporate entrepreneurship, broken down into three categories:

• Collaboration through ’social computing’ - enabling people to find each other and not have to ‘reinvent the wheel’, let voices and ideas be heard, and allow people to describe and categorize knowledge in the way they find most useful.
• Analytics and business intelligence - finding ways to take advantage of the masses of data being collected by firms.
• ‘Mass collaboration’ with the outside world - linking to innovation capabilities outside of any one business.

But can mere technology make a difference? Conventional wisdom says that corporate culture and leadership ultimately determine whether businesses can become more innovative and entrepreneurial, and that technologies are just tools. I wonder. Maybe the technology itself, if it connects enough people together, can be the source of significant change. Let’s see what our visiting executives have to say.

The slides are available here. This session will be part of the USF Corporate Entrepreneurship Latin America program for the ADEN Business School of Argentina, rated as the top MBA program in Latin America by Latin Trade magazine. Thanks to my colleague Carlos Baradello for organizing the session.

New presentation on the ‘IT Innovation Gap’

Research shows that IT investments pay off nicely in general, and that IT is a big contributor to labor productivity. So why are so many companies frustrated with their IT department, and complain about disappointing and inflexible enterprise technology?

My presentation on what I call the ‘IT Innovation Gap’ tries to show why so little IT investment is spent on innovation, and how the next generation of ‘Open innovation models’ might provide a much needed innovation boost to a tech industry that sometimes gets in the way of change.

The presentation slides are available here. This talk was given as part of USF’s executive education program for the Management Institute of Paris, France. Thanks to my colleague Nick Imparato for inviting me to speak.

Sadly, I never had a chance to try out my Français très mauvais on the group.