In a Wall Street Journal piece today, Ethan Penner reminds us that Big Business Creates Jobs Too. He also makes an important point that innovation is not confined to small businesses:
It is actually within large companies that an entrepreneur can find, already in existence, much of what it takes to insure a venture's success. This includes the capital required to fund startup costs, the marketing presence to create a near-instant reach to customers, and the standing required to gain trust of both vendors and customers. The two largest bond fund managers in the world, Pimco and Blackrock, were born inside of existing large companies--Pacific Mutual Life and Blackstone, respectively--and flourished under entrepreneurial leadership. Blackrock then went on grow immensely after it was sold to Mellon Bank.Just as technology does not encompass the entire concept of innovation, neither does entrepreneurship. Supporting entrepreneurship helps support innovation. But support to entrepreneurship is not all we need to be doing. We need to find ways to support innovation in large organizations as well -- beyond technology policy. How can we foster the movement to open innovation, user-driven innovation, and greater collaboration? How can we foster "design thinking" as an innovation-creating process? As I noted earlier, these are the key trends in innovation. But we have yet to understand the public policy implications of this shift.
Apple Computer, a great example of a small company success, at one point was solely focused on computers. Yet in the past several years Apple's success has been driven by many new business lines including the iPod and iPhone. These product-line successes illustrate how a big company can entrepreneurially exploit its brand name, related technological expertise in the industry, access to capital, and sales and marketing reach. There is no doubt that if someone tried to launch either the iPhone or the iPod from his garage the results would not be what they have been for Apple.
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