EVALUATING CORPORATE ENTREPRENEURSHIP AT FACEBOOK INC

EVALUATING CORPORATE ENTREPRENEURSHIP AT FACEBOOK INC
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Introduction
One issue that is usually in the minds of CEOs of various firms is organizational growth. Markets, on the other hand, demand growth. However, attaining profitable corporate growth in multiple institutions has become a hard nut to crack. Normally organizational growth in organizations stagnates immediately after the primary business begins to flag. Numerous studies have found out that less than 5% of business organizations hardly regain 1 % organizational growth after flagging. To avert this vice, most successful businesses have resorted to establishing corporate entrepreneurship to continue surging up in terms of organizational growth. Creating successful corporate entrepreneurs in an already existing business has equally proven to a difficult task as most companies such as Enron Corporation failed terribly in the quest to attain the same. This paper will discuss the four major models of corporate entrepreneurship broadly and observe which one of them played a significant role in the success of Facebook’s growth.
Understanding Corporate Entrepreneurship
Before getting to understand how corporate entrepreneurship works, it is essential to understand what corporate entrepreneurship means in the first place. The term corporate entrepreneurship has several definitions. For instance, according to Sharma and Chrisman (2007), corporate entrepreneurship entails collaboration between an organization and individuals or teams to create a new business within the existing organization. Nevertheless, the definition that seems interesting is that which refers to corporate entrepreneurship as a process whereby teams within a given organization conceive, foster, launch, and manage a different business from the parent institution (Walcott and Lippits, 2007). However, the new business should still leverage the assets and other resources from the parent company.
In most cases, people do confuse corporate entrepreneurship with corporate venture capital. This is because the two initiatives look similar in that they both involve external partners. However, unlike corporate venture capital, where organizations put financial investments in a different company, corporate entrepreneurship utilizes resources from the parent company, and above all, the new business is managed by members from the parent organization.
Models of Corporate Entrepreneurship
According to Walcott and Lippitz (2007), the major mistake that various organizations made in the past while, establishing corporate entrepreneurship was the emulation of innovation leaders. This procedure failed since it limited the team members of the various organizations from maximizing their potentials, as they were not given the freedom to try new things. To come up with successful corporate entrepreneurship, organizations need to consider two significant dimensions, which are the organization ownership and the resource authority within the organization. The two aspects, in return, lead the creation of the four major models of corporate entrepreneurship, namely opportunist, enabler, advocate, and producer models. In summary, the opportunist model is a p...