Beyond Disruption: Entrepreneurial Leadership Within Existing Organizations

Why do large, successful companies often have such difficulty in disrupting themselves (e.g., Kodak, Blockbuster, Borders)? How do you maintain an entrepreneurial edge within an existing enterprise? How do you sustain core businesses while simultaneously adapting to disruptive threats? In this course, students will build the skills to spot threats and opportunities earlier and capture them faster. The course will take a look at some of the most successful "creators within corporations" and discern why some strategies succeed when others do not. We will explore the framework that some companies have developed to simultaneously compete in their core business while exploring new ones. To do this we will interact with guests from firms like Walmart, Amazon, General Motors, Flex and IBM as well as venture capitalists and entrepreneurs. Our objective is to help students understand in some detail what it takes to help organizations stay ahead of disruptive threats and to avoid problems that often lead companies into decline.