by Cinzia Parolini

SDA Professor of Strategic and Entrepreneurial Management

• Altri Post (2)

Negli ultimi anni è andato crescendo fra le start-up della digital economy un movimento (il Lean Start-Up Movement) secondo il quale la chiave del successo di una nuova iniziativa imprenditoriale non passa attraverso la scrittura di business plan, ma testando direttamente il mercato con un “minimum viable product”, innescando così un processo di apprendimento e miglioramento continuo (validated learning process). Nelle parole di Steve Blank, dal suo articolo "Why the Lean-Startup changes everything" su Harvard Business Review (2013): 

“Launching a new enterprise has always been a hit-or-miss proposition. According to the decades-old formula, you write a business plan, pitch it to investors, assemble a team, introduce a product, and start selling as hard as you can. And somewhere in this sequence of events, you’ll probably suffer a fatal setback”.

Blank e Ries (autore del libro The Lean Start-Up) affermano di avere trovato il "Santo Graal dello start-upper", la formula che consente di ridurre la rischiosità del lancio di nuovi business, proponendo una metodologia che favorisce la sperimentazione rispetto alla pianificazione, il feedback dei clienti rispetto all’intuito e il design iterativo rispetto al design realizzato up-front, prima di lanciare il prodotto o servizio sul mercato attraverso. Una prospettiva che ha senz'altro avuto un impatto molto diffuso nello scenario delle nuove iniziative imprenditoriali, che, tuttavia, non è così dirompente come suggerito dai suoi autori e può essere applicata con successo solo in determinati contesti e se integrata con strumenti e modelli tradizionali. Vediamo perché, approfondendo nel dettaglio i due principali pilastri della Lean Startup: il business model canvas e il processo di validated learning.

by Markus Venzin

SDA Professor of Strategic and Entrepreneurial Management

• Profilo
|
• Altri Post (10)

What are the next steps now after the strong “ókhi” (no) vote of the Greek population against the last bail out offer from the creditors? The EU can’t let Greece fall by the wayside. There is so much more at stake than the cost of a bailout: Patients struggle without medicines and elderly citizens cry in front of closed banks because they can no longer access their pensions. Children are hit hard as services dry up. The EU cannot say "this is not our problem anymore."

To find a solution, let's take for a moment a management perspective, with Greece being a subsidiary, and the EU its parent company. How would the top management team of this multinational company handle the issue?

by Stefano Cavallazzi

Research Fellow of Organization and HR Management

• Profilo
|
• Altri Post (1)

What does it take to translate the organization’s entrepreneurial and innovative effort into effective market outcomes? How do you set proper execution practices that allow you to pursue new competitive opportunities? Since Schumpeter suggested that entrepreneurs are the main agents of economic growth and market renewal in 1936, Corporate Entrepreneurship (CE) research has tried to shed some light on how firms can structure a process that allows the organization to identify and pursue value-creating opportunities leveraging on employees’ entrepreneurial behaviors. Scholars developed and refined the Corporate Entrepreneurship Assessment Instrument (CEAI) to evaluate four dimensions of organizational climate (management support, individual work discretion, rewards and time availability) as antecedents of innovative output and concluded that higher levels of entrepreneurial climate generate increased innovation.

by Antonello Garzoni

SDA Professor of Strategic and Entrepreneurial Management

• Profilo
|
• Altri Post (2)

La crescita all’estero è per molte aziende italiane un grande stimolo per avviare nuove esperienze, inserire nei team manageriali persone di diversa nazionalità e con background culturali e abitudini differenti, identificare le best practice e trasferirle all’interno delle organizzazioni. In una sola parola: stimolare la cross-fertilization. Ma la fertilizzazione incrociata, quando è mal gestita, comporta problemi organizzativi non facilmente superabili.

Racconta l’imprenditore di una grande impresa industriale italiana, a valle della sua esperienza in Cina: “Compriamo la grande azienda cinese e mandiamo il nostro gruppo di manager a verificare la situazione. I cinesi hanno il grande mito degli italiani e degli europei, poi capiscono che gli italiani sono anche un po’ casinisti, non sempre sono puntualissimi e tendono ad aprire molto al confronto con i propri riporti diretti… E i cinesi dopo un po’ iniziano ad alzare la manina e a bloccare alcuni processi, facendo perdere competitività. Gli italiani non capiscono e dicono che i cinesi sono pigri e non vogliono collaborare. Si creano due gruppi, con tutte le difficoltà per trovare soluzioni e lavorare insieme”. 

by Mikkel Draebye

SDA Professor of Strategic and Entrepreneurial Management

• Profilo
|
• Altri Post (2)

In 1982, Dietrich Mateschitz was marketing director for a toothpaste company. Like many other people in Thaliand, especially workers, he bought and drank Krating Daeng ("Red Bull") to give him a boost of energy and to fight jet-lag.
Observing that there was a strong domestic demand for the drink, Mateschitz hooked up with Chaleo Yoovidhya, founder of TC Pharmaceuticals that had launched Krating Daeng in Thaliand back in 1976 on a project aimed at introducing the product in Europe. Mateschitz invested all his savings and the European version of Redbull (a carbonated energy drink with an adapted taste) was launched in Austria in 1987 and is now the world's leading brand in the energy drink category.

In 2008 CocaCola decided to launch their own energy drink (Monster) and in 2009 Pepsi followed with signing a distribution deal with Rockstar Energy.
There might be several reasons for why CocaCola and Pepsi, with their existing brand, production facilities, market intelligence units, marketing research and customer monitoring, did not pick up and experimented with this new category before 10 years after Mateschitz “couped” the market, but the situation is not atypical. In spite of being present on the market, having money to pay consultants and marketing people to follow market developments and trends and in spite of having existing distribution networks and therefore easy access to market data, many large companies are struggling to be pro-active, fast, entrepreneurial and innovative.