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Corporate Venturing |
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Rent apartment in Bucharest downtown - Accommodation Romania Entrepreneurs can choose to start a new venture from scratch, buy an existing business and build it, or stait a venture inside a large existing organization. The choice is a function of the type of business, the opportunity, and the suppoit for such a venture inside the existing organization if any. For example, when capital markets make it difficult to find funding, entrepreneurs are less likely to start new ventures from scratch. By contrast, they are more likely to start new ventures on their own when the incentives inside large organizations are weak or nonexistent, when the opportunity requires individual effort, and when the normal scale advantages and learning curves do not provide advantages to the large organization. Entrepreneurs also choose the start-up process when industry entry barriers are low, when the environment is more uncertain, and when the opportunity they seek to exploit involves a breakthrough or disruptive technology that will make previous technology obsolete. Large organizations are finding it increasingly necessary to provide for entrepreneurial activity to remain competitive. As they saw themselves lagging behind small, young companies in finding great opportunities, they began to look for ways to restructure their organizations to allow creative employees to search for new opportunities the company could exploit. Recognizing that it is nearly an impossible task to re-engineer and redesign an entire organization, many companies have ctiosen the "skunk works" route (named for Lockheed's unit that developed the Stealth fighter jet). Skunk works refers to an autonomous group that is given the mandate to find and develop new products for the company that may even be outside the company's core competencies. Other companies attempt to encourage intrapreneurship, or entrepreneurship inside the structures of their existing organization. This approach at best has been difficult to achieve because the bureaucratic structures of most large organizations—the restrictions of hierarchies of decision making, their inherent avoidance of risk, and strict budgets—all challenge even the most enthusiastic of corporate entrepreneurs. For an entrepreneurial mindset to succeed inside a large corporation requires: |
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