Large Corporations Fail To Innovate Like Startups

Large corporations and conglomerates, the engines of growth and vitality in the twentieth century, have lost their edge and their image. They have proven themselves unable to innovate, and they have lost more jobs than they create. My friends who “grew up” with lifetime careers in General Motors, Exxon Mobil, or even IBM, are now often too embarrassed to even mention it.

On the other hand, everyone wants to be an entrepreneur. We can all aspire to grow companies like Google, Facebook, and Apple, which have the aura of fun, while still improving your lifestyle and offering the dream of untold riches.

In his recent book “The 3rd American Dream,” thought leader Suresh Sharma summarizes the large corporate accomplishments of the 19th and 20th centuries, and then lays out the potential of a new entrepreneurial business ecosystem for the 21st century. His focus is on entrepreneurs in America, but what he says applies to every other country as well.

I agree with Sharma that it’s time to move on to a new way of thinking, living, and doing business, especially after the recent demoralizing recessionary times. This next frontier lies in building enterprises as an entrepreneur, rather than waiting for innovation and opportunity from large corporations. They have become a by-product of innovation rather than the cause of it:

1. Conglomerates grew from industrialization, not innovation. Most of their new claims to innovation are acquired through mergers and acquisitions from the entrepreneurial pipeline. Internal corporate processes thwart innovation due to inherent inefficiencies of scale, high overhead, and the risk of impact on the corporate bottom line.
2. Existing technologies have been “commoditized” globally. Many countries have learned to make products cheaper and better. Competitive advantages are rapidly vaporizing on these. Having only a large capital base and distribution channels, with no innovation, is not a sustainable business model.

1. Large corporations no longer create jobs in their home location. There is no shortage of data to support the assertion that the old large corporations have lost more jobs than they’ve created at home. Outsourcing and manufacturing “offshore” have become the norm. Entrepreneurs growing companies create more value and more jobs.
2. Non-industrial large organizations cling to outdated business models. Financial institutions, for example, count on pure capital plays without innovation that can disappear quickly. Government bail-outs do not promote innovation. These companies usually end up going extinct, like Lehman Brothers, WorldCom, and Enron.

The new corporate model is a distributed entrepreneurial model. Customers today demand products and services personalized or tailored to local needs with embedded quality of life services. Scaling is done first by customer alliances through social media, and later by distributed joint ventures and coopetition. We need the new wave of entrepreneurs to facilitate:

1. A new era for manufacturing enterprises. New emerging manufacturing technologies (e.g., digital and 3D printing) in small shops or a town’s industrial and innovation hub can bring manufacturing back home. The new twenty-first century corporation can be born virtually anywhere. Single-node factories may be home-based with a global market.
2. New goldmine of innovations and technology. Universities and other R&D groups have created a large number of new inventions and innovations, mostly lying dormant on the shelves of our researchers and labs, waiting to be commercialized by aspiring entrepreneurs, with minimal up-front costs for licensing.
3. Next wave of economic expansion. The time is ripe for the new entrepreneurial dream. People are emerging from recent economic disasters with a new appetite for change, and making the world a better place. Gen-Y is approaching the business world with solid personal goals, and expect to create something that is creative, fun, and rewarding.
4. The cost of entrepreneur entry is at an all-time low. With e-commerce, Internet, and smartphone apps, anyone can be an entrepreneur today for a few hundred dollars, without a huge investment, bank loans, venture capitalists, or Angels. With the global market, the growth opportunity is huge, starting local and scaling at any pace.

If you are already in the entrepreneur lifestyle, you probably realize that it’s hard work and very risky. Nobody said it would be easy, but nothing that is easy satisfies for long. The days of easy and safe jobs in the large corporate world are over, and certainly not very satisfying either.

We need this new generation of entrepreneurs who relish the challenge and the opportunity of rebuilding our business engine to fit the culture and the global needs of the twenty-first century. What’s holding you back from jumping on the wave?

Reprinted by permission.

Image credit: CC by Kansir