Cargill's Emerging Business Accelerator
In our first posting here, we introduced the Four models of Corporate Entrepreneurship. In our last posting, we described a Producer Model organization at Cisco. (NASDAQ: CSCO). Today, we complete our tour with the story of Cargill's Producer organization.
Cargill (privately held) is a $75 billion global agriculture products and services company, established its Emerging Business Accelerator (EBA) in 2004. EBA is not about innovation, per se. Cargill has a chief innovation officer organization, embedded within Product Development, that focuses on developing ideas for innovation that can potentially be applied in other parts of the company. Cargill made a conscious decision to separate this innovation promotion function, which focuses on tools, processes, and other enhancements to existing businesses, from EBA, which is about building new businesses. EBA was created for the following specific purposes:
•To be a global clearinghouse to originate value propositions, that is., a place for people to send their new business ideas
•To focus on opportunities that will generate revenues within three years (so that people would not think of EBA as an R&D funding source)
•To select, staff, fund, and monitor—but not operate—a portfolio of new businesses (EBA is not expected to act as a project manager)
•To graduate successful businesses into the world of Cargill
For instance, when Cargill's deicing business unit identified a novel deicing technology, the group realized that it might not be well suited to develop and commercialize the innovation. The technology—an epoxy overlay that inhibits ice formation—was going be a high-end product that would be sold to road builders worldwide for critical applications such as bridges. But Cargill's deicing business unit primarily sells commodity products to Department of Transportation agencies in North America. So the new technology was transferred to the Emerging Business Accelerator, which brought the offering to market.
Successes such as this have helped the Emerging Business Accelerator achieve its goal of being a global clearinghouse for new concepts and value propositions across Cargill. The group maintains a Web site for people to submit ideas, from both inside and outside the company. The project selection process generally proceeds as follows:
•Origination. EBA asks four basic questions in the early stages of a business concept: (1) What is the idea? (2) What is the value to the customer? (3) What is the value to Cargill? (4) What are the points of differentiation and the competitive advantage?
•Preliminary due diligence (15 days). This involves an initial market assessment of the broad financial parameters of the marketplace.
•Due diligence (next 60–90 days). The EBA team conducts a typical due diligence process prior to submitting an investment memo to its board. If the investment is approved, EBA begins to implement a high-level plan, which includes the three most important questions about the concept—i.e., what are the most critical uncertainties, how much money is it going to take to get there, and how many people will be needed.
•Recruit talent and provide funds (next 30 days).
•Monitor performance (next 1–5 years), What is the progress in resolving the three critical uncertainties? If a project is not hitting its milestones, EBA revisits it. Perhaps these were not the correct three questions, and hence these were not the right milestones. Or maybe there are other learnings that are valuable.
Projects that achieve validation from real customers graduate into either existing or new business units. Through 2008, the EBA has evaluated more than 450 opportunities. It has invested in 13, of which 2 have “graduated” into ongoing Cargill businesses, 2 were sold, 4 were discontinued, and 5 remain in the EBA portfolio.
Robert C. Wolcott and Michael J. Lippitz are leading authorities on innovation and corporate entrepreneurship at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, and co-authors of Grow From Within: Mastering Corporate Entrepreneurship and Innovation (McGraw Hill, 2010). In the past seven years, they have studied more than 30 companies across industry sectors and developed an ongoing dialogue with them about corporate entrepreneurship through the Kellogg Innovation Network (KIN)
