RGM

On May 11, 2009, Rita McGrath spoke about Discovery Driven Growth in an interview with Economic Perspectives. To listen to the interview, please click here. The link to the audio can be found as you scroll down the page.

• Posted: Thursday, May 28, 2009

In a story about how unpretentious "Mattress Mack" opened a little store by the side of the freeway, turned it into booming business, but recently suffered a devastating fire, Rita McGrath was quoted: "Americans love the Horatio Alger story -- the poor boy who works hard and makes good," she said. The complete story can be read here.

• Posted: Monday, May 25, 2009

A scholarly study conducted over two years by Rita and her co-authors, Thomas Keil and Taina Tukiainen, has just been published in Organization Science.. This is our abstract:

Our longitudinal study of the entire population of internal corporate ventures within a large European electronics manufacturer finds that the conventional focus in the corporate venturing literature to evaluate ventures based on business growth and financial performance may be misguided. Instead, we found that ventures are temporary conduits for capability development and play a primary role in launching the founding stage of new capability life cycles. Ventures' main contribution was often to transfer valuable capabilities to other ventures or the firm's existing business units. The benefit from investing in ventures was therefore largely independent of their commercial success. Furthermore, estimation of success rates proved highly sensitive to the stage of the ventures at which sampling began. These findings suggest the need to reconceptualize the notion of early stage ventures and their success. We further found that the venturing process can be conceptualized as a nested system of simultaneous selection at both the venture and the capability level. We show that these selection processes are distinct yet operate in a coevolutionary way and are amenable to proactive management.

Dates: May 19, 2000

• Posted: Tuesday, May 19, 2009

In a NYT article, Saving by Sharing a Room, "Rita McGrath, associate professor of management at Columbia University Business School, estimated that companies could save as much as 50 percent of travel costs by asking employees to share their quarters on the road." Read the entire article here.

• Posted: Friday, May 15, 2009

37Signals.com's post: Ian MacMillan, Wharton professor of innovation and entrepreneurship, and Rita Gunther McGrath, a professor at Columbia Business School, believe "the only plan is to learn as you go." They say 1) conventional approaches and planning don't work when you're trying to get into new spaces, 2) assumptions are what get most companies into trouble, and 3) it's not failure that companies need to avoid, but rather "failing expensively." To read the entire post, click here.

• Posted: Friday, May 08, 2009