INTRAPRENEURIAL CORPORATE RENEWAL

No organization has an inalienable right to survival in the current hypercompetitive global marketplace with vanishing borders Moreover, an accelerating rate of technology-driven change has already collapsed product and process life cycles often to fewer than five years in many industries, rendering equipment and facilities obsolete long before their useful lives can be realized. Consequently, any organization not involved in a process of continuous intrapreneurial renewal, likely has made an unintentional decision not to survive for long. Continuous renewal means simultaneous investments of significant magnitude both for incremental improvements in existing operations (just to stay alive). as well as next-generation systems, deliberately designed to render current operations obsolete, before a competitor assuredly will do so. Unfortunately, time-critical development of next-generation technologies usually requires a multiplicity of skills and resources beyond the capability of even large companies to hold captive. Also, long periods of negative cash flow during development can be increasingly difficult to justify. As a result, collaborative efforts increasingly will be required to pool skills and resources while operating through a disciplined process of concurrent engineering or modified matrix management. These forms of management are better understood than they currently practiced.