The main purpose of this course is to highlight the key innovation challenges faced by established firms: exploiting existing opportunities, exploiting new opportunities, and balancing the exploitation of existing and new opportunities throughout the firm's evolution. In particular, we will focus here on the conflicts inherent in having to manage these various challenges simultaneously. This course will also focus on entrepreneurship in large established companies: 'corporate entrepreneurship' aka 'intrapreneurship.' It examines the role of corporate entrepreneurs and how to manage project champions/venture managers, and what some of the organizational design issues are related to corporate entrepreneurship. In particular, we will study the strategic challenges that extremely successful companies face in trying to break out of co-evolutionary lock-in with their mainstream product-market environment, the strategic tensions arising between efforts to develop new businesses based on external acquisition versus internal development of new technologies, the strategic leadership challenges associated with trying to develop new growth opportunities that require significant cultural change, and the strategic leadership challenges associated with linking new business opportunities to corporate strategy.
2 units · GSB Letter Graded
The main purpose of this course is to highlight the key innovation challenges faced by established firms: exploiting existing opportunities, exploiting new opportunities, and balancing the exploitation of existing and new opportunities throughout the firm's evolution. In particular, we will focus here on the conflicts inherent in having to manage these various challenges simultaneously. This course will also focus on entrepreneurship in large established companies: 'corporate entrepreneurship' aka 'intrapreneurship.' It examines the role of corporate entrepreneurs and how to manage project champions/venture managers, and what some of the organizational design issues are related to corporate entrepreneurship. In particular, we will study the strategic challenges that extremely successful companies face in trying to break out of co-evolutionary lock-in with their mainstream product-market environment, the strategic tensions arising between efforts to develop new businesses based on external acquisition versus internal development of new technologies, the strategic leadership challenges associated with trying to develop new growth opportunities that require significant cultural change, and the strategic leadership challenges associated with linking new business opportunities to corporate strategy.
Offered in Autumn 2026 at Stanford University.