Managing Your Core Incompetencies for Corporate Venturing

Abstract

Internal ventures and a firm's core competencies are mutually constitutive, since each both contributes to and builds on the other. This field study compared successful and failed new product ventures In four large firms, to learn how competencies and ventures relate. The link between ventures and competencies was important to success. It was also difficult to achieve, because a scaffolding of reified rules, called core incompetencies, had grown around the competencies to dominate thought and action. Some ways to break out of the core incompetencies are developed from the successful efforts, and summarized in the discussion.