For an increasing number of established companies, creating new businesses and programs within the company is an imperative for success. Maturing technologies and aging product portfolios are requiring established companies to create, develop, and sustain innovative new initiatives. In this course, learners will develop knowledge on how to navigate the barriers to creating, developing, and sustain innovative new businesses and programs within established companies or organizations with an emphasis on: • Introducing the skills for identifying and analyzing entrepreneurial ideas within a corporate environment; • Examining entrepreneurial thinking within yourself and your colleagues with an awareness of entrepreneurial mindset, entrepreneurial motivations, and entrepreneurial behaviors; • Cultivating seeing entrepreneurially within yourself and your colleagues with attention to industry conditions, industry status, macroeconomic change, and competition; and • Championing acting entrepreneurially within the corporate environment with an understanding of value innovation and opportunity identification. Try this course for FREE at https://www.coursera.org/learn/corporate-entrepreneurs-opportunity
What is your tolerance for ambiguity?
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来自 University of Maryland, College Park 的课程
Developing the Opportunity for Corporate Entrepreneurs
43 个评分
University of Maryland, College Park
43 个评分
课程 1（共 5 门，Specialization Corporate Entrepreneurship: Innovating within Corporations）
从本节课中
Thinking Entrepreneurially
Examine entrepreneurial thinking within yourself and your colleagues with an awareness of entrepreneurial mindset, entrepreneurial motivations, and entrepreneurial behaviors
与讲师见面
Dr. James V. GreenDirector of Entrepreneurship Education
Maryland Technology Enterprise Institute
As entrepreneurs face many dynamic challenges, tolerance for
that ambiguity is surely an asset.
And we'll examine tolerance in the context of entrepreneurship, its impact and
influence on successful new venturing,
as well as how to assess your personal tolerance for ambiguity.
So this is the third piece of our discussion
of entrepreneurial motivation as it relates to strategic decision making.
Our definition for tolerance for ambiguity is the tendency to perceive ambiguous or
unclear situations as acceptable or even desirable rather than threatening.
And the need for tolerance ambiguity in entrepreneurship is clear,
in that markets change, customers change,
competition changes, regulations change, politics change.
So in that way, when you're dealing with many different changing forces,
you need to be comfortable with experiencing the unexpected.
And with that, you can face and
make complex decisions relatively quickly with limited information.
And we see in this case a public company, an entrepreneurial company,
but a large company, that has had to improve their tolerance,
had to respond to change, and have had some struggles of late.
So this is a company that I expect we all know,
that in a two year span, from 2006 to 2008,
80% of their market value disappeared.
They went from a $40 stock to about an $8 stock.
Now they've rebounded, and they've rebounded under the guidance
of their former CEO, who while not the founder of Starbucks,
was a very early entrant with the company and
built it to be the global powerhouse that it is.
So we'll hear a little bit from Howard Schultz,
the situation that he found himself in when he was asked to return to Starbucks.
And we'll talk too about some of the things they've done
as they face change and how they've responded to it.
>> When I came back, I did a couple things that, not that they were unprecedented,
but they were unorthodox.
One was, we stopped reporting monthly comps.
But in the first three months of me returning,
I did something that probably had never been done before.
And that is, we closed every store for training.
>> Right.
>> And that turned out to be a PR bonanza, but it wasn't designed for that.
What is was was an admission of guilt.
We had to stand up to our people and our customers and say,
you know what, over the years there's been a dilution of quality, and
to continue like this is a mistake.
So we literally closed every store.
The cost was millions of dollars.
I came under tremendous criticism.
And the competition really smelt blood, and they went after us.
But it was, again, one of those galvanizing moments of demonstrating to
our people and the marketplace that this was not going to stand anymore.
That in fact,
we were going to significantly increase the qualitative measures.
And that turned out to be another major turning point for the company.
>> But even those types of bold moves, and
the book is filled with bold move after bold move after bold move.
And almost every single time, there's a group assembled who
doesn't think you should do it and who questions you and challenges you.
So for those of us who run enterprises of any size, should we ever expect
that the group of people who work with us should sort of give us that credibility,
or are we only ever as good to Wall Street,
to the people who work with us, as our last right call?
>> Well, I think, let me try and answer it this way.
I think great entrepreneurs must have the curiosity to kind of
metaphorically see around the corner.
What's coming, what can I anticipate that other people don't see?
And then you must have the courage of your convictions to execute the strategy.
Every decision is different, and certain people have different insight and
different skills.
And in the book, I write about some things that I decided on my own that were wrong
and that were catastrophic in some ways.
I don't always have the right decision.
Now, when we brought in a new team,
this is a world class group of people who have skills and insight well beyond me.
The decisions we're making today are more skewed towards consensus than they were in
the past, because of the trust of the team.
However, I will make the final decision, and I-
>> You reserve that right.
>> And I also, I will take the responsibility if that decision is wrong.
>> Well, that's just happened with,
at least the way you describe it, with VIA, the.
So you have a team working for, well, for a very, very long time,
but as the product launch comes near, >> Yes.
>> VIA the instant coffee product.
And you've got these, a lot of great people working on it,
maybe these very same people you're describing.
But at some point, at some point it ends up, again, in your living room
with a couple of old consultants that you had worked with in the past,
where you say, let's get this right.
>> Well, I think this is a great case study.
The instant coffee category is a $24 billion category globally,
has not had any innovation for over 50 years, and is dominated by one company.
But for a company like Starbucks whose image is based on high quality,
especially coffee, to go into the instant coffee category,
one could assume would be a death sentence.
And when we announced we were doing this,
the media and Wall Street just basically wanted to destroy me.
And the headlines were terrible.
But again, I felt we saw something that other people didn't see.
But the litmus test for
this is, we had to replicate taste of Starbucks coffee in an instant form.
Once we cracked the code with technology,
I knew right away that this would be a success.
Via's been a runaway hit for the company,
it'd probably be $250 million as we sit today, and
we haven't really begun to introduce it globally, where 81% of the market is.
So this is a major hit for the company.
And it also did something, and I think this is important.
You know, not everything should be measured on its own merit.
This again was an opportunity to rekindle and
remind the organization about the entrepreneurial spirit and
the courage of the company to take the road less traveled.
And our people where so proud of the fact that we were about to do something
that was against the grain that was going to succeed.
And I don't believe there's any coffee company that could've done
this other than us, not because we're better than anyone else,
but because of the way in which it was positioned, and
obviously, the passion we have to bring this to market in a very unique way.
>> So you've heard a little bit about some of the challenges and
some of the response, but I'd like to give you a few more details and highlights.
So one of the first things he did when he came back on board was close every
store in the US, 7,100 stores closed for three and a half hours
to retrain all of the baristas, all of the individuals that made the drinks.
They found that the drinks were not consistently made to the quality
that they desired nor with the speed that was necessary.
So customers were waiting in line for a long time to get a drink that they were
unhappy with, to perhaps be unhappy enough not to return or to voice discontent,
and having to remake things, or refund their purchase.
This may not seem like a big deal, but in just that three and a half hours,
projections are that Starbucks lost $6 million in the US from that one event.
But he found it as necessary and
fundamental to reframing the situation they were in.
They also redesigned many of their stores
to return it back to more of a classic coffee house feel.
They also stopped doing some things.
They dramatically rolled back and reduced the amount of non-food and
non-drink merchandise.
They pulled out a lot of the CDs and the books and
things that were overpowering some of the stores.
They also realized that while people knew them,
they wanted them to have a greater mindshare of Starbucks.
And for the first time ever, they launched a national campaign,
a national advertising campaign, both print and television,
to remind people what Starbucks was and to reintroduce it to what it was presently.
They also kept doing some things that were important to them,
namely health insurance.
One of the only large companies in the US that provide health insurance universally
to all employees, including part time employees.
They could save significant cost, hundreds of millions of dollars,
by reducing that or doing away with it, but they chose not to.
They saw this element of employee welfare and employee well being and
employee health as critical to what they were as a company.
And so they've held fast to some of those values even in challenging times, and
even amid the voice of stock holders that in some part suggested that they
reposition themselves and do less of this.
They've had the courage not to do that, and to do other new things.
One of them is instant coffee, which for
decades has been viewed as the lowest of the lowest quality of coffee,
something that was bought in grocery stores for a dollar a pound or
a dollar a can, that they brought to market at a dollar per pack.
What you see here, one dollar.
But they've aimed to do it at very high quality and
have put in significant research and development and
consumer testing to try and deliver an instant product.
A category that's been around a long time, but
a category that's not commonly associated with high quality.
And they've done it, and they've done it well.
And they sell it in stores as well as in groceries.
But continuing to innovate, continuing to do new things.
They also have a campaign by which they solicit customer ideas.
Over the last five years, they've launched 277 customer-generated ideas.
Things like free Wi-Fi you would think would be a bit obvious, but for
many years, unless you were an AT&T customer in the US,
you could not have free Wi-Fi at Starbucks.
That changed a few years ago.
Customers have also brought to bear new flavor ideas, free birthday treats,
happy hour, mobile payment through the drive-through, cake pops,
and a variety of other things.
All under the concept of recognizing that they're in a changing market,
they're in a competitive market, they're in a competitive global market,
and that they're willing to listen to the customer to help reduce some of
that ambiguity and bring new, inspiring ideas to market.
The newest new thing that they're doing in the states is this concept of
a Starbucks evening.
Now, this is currently as fall of 2014
being test marketed in five cities in the US.
And the concept is that they want to bring a more elegant atmosphere with wine,
with more comfort foods, with higher-end desserts, with select beer options,
and have more of a night life atmosphere in their Starbucks.
Now, how that matches individuals that are on their laptop
with coffee doing homework at night is yet to see.
But what we do see here is an idea of experimentation, of recognizing that they
have tremendous assets in the real estate that they occupy and
in the space that they're paying for 24/7, and
is there an alternative use or a better use for some of those stores.
Now, will all of them go this direction?
Probably not.
Will some of them?
I would think so.
So in that way, perhaps they're going to be Starbucks that
operate much like they do now, but 5% or 20% or
50% of the Starbucks may have this evening model that
they have layered into the experiences as well.
So continuing to innovate, continuing to try new things,
continuing to not be comfortable as they once were, because they've seen
that if you get comfortable, you can lose 80% of your value.
So when we think about this element of tolerance for ambiguity, we're interested
in you assessing your own and completing and posting the evaluation online for us.
And the types of insights that we hope you find is that it will measure your
comfort with uncertainty, with change, with unfamiliar situations,
and get you thinking about some of the characteristics that you'll
face in the development and launch of new ventures.
And how you can improve your tolerance, one is through experience.
As you enter and experience new things,
the next time you experience them they’re not as new.
You have some know-how, you have some capabilities you’ve established,
you have some insights or
some relationships or some resources to deal with them the next time.
So trying new things and going beyond your comfort zone, professionally and
personally, is a good way to develop this tolerance.
It's also very helpful to talk with other aspiring and
active entrepreneurs about some of the challenges they face.
It demystifies a bit of the process.
It makes it a little less lonely.
It emphasizes that you're not the only one facing certain challenges.
And so in that way, within our own class, but
also within cities and countries that you're residing,
there may be other networks of entrepreneurs that meet periodically,
perhaps socially, perhaps professionally.
But there are these groups that allow you to voice and learn from one another.
In particular, you should have the opportunity to build friendships with
entrepreneurs that are outside of your category, that are not direct competitors.
Or maybe they do what you do, but they do it in a different city or
a different state that’s not competitive, you can talk about such things and
share the stories and share the instances and learn from others, and
thereby improve your tolerance in that context as well.
So in summary, when we think about tolerance for ambiguity or
even a preference for ambiguity, it is an asset.
It’s an asset to making decisions and
making complex decisions quickly and with limited information.
When we look at uncertainty, when we look at change and we look at the unfamiliar,
that is somewhat the norm when you’re doing something that’s truly innovative.
And it's only in those trying new things and building relationships with others and
particularly with fellow entrepreneurs that can help navigate those paths and
help navigate that journey a bit more comfortably.
