Entrepreneurship is a competence in only the rarest corporation. Pity, as its absence has led to the death of many revered companies. In an economic environment characterized by dramatic change, the ability to explore emerging opportunities by launching and learning from strategic experiments is more critical to survival than ever.
A strategic experiment is a risky new venture within an established corporation. It is a multiyear bet within a poorly defined industry that has no clear formula for making a profit. Potential customers are mere possibilities. Value propositions are guesses. And activities that lead to profitable outcomes are unclear.
Most executives who have been involved in strategic experiments agree that the key to success is learning quickly. In a race to define an emerging industry, the competitor that learns first generally wins. Unfortunately, habits embedded in the conventional planning process disable learning. A better approach, theory-focused planning, differs from traditional planning on six counts.
The Need for Strategic Innovation
In the late 1990s, Corning Inc. began to explore a possibility far beyond its existing lines of business. The strategic experiment, Corning Microarray Technologies (CMT), sought to usher in a new era in genomics research. (See “About the Research.”) DNA microarrays, glass slides with thousands of tiny DNA samples printed on their surfaces, were a key piece of experimental apparatus for measuring DNA interactions in large... To read the complete article, login or sign-up using the form below.
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