Learning from Failure

Venture management, which appeared to hold great promise as a means of generating innovative products and businesses internally, has been eagerly embraced and subsequently abandoned by a number of large companies. Executives at these firms often expressed the opinion that venture management was just another blind alley which failed to produce the new sources of revenue and profits its advocates anticipated. A study of twenty-one venture failures in twelve large companies revealed that venture management is in no sense a blind alley but is beset by all the errors that plague the untried and the unfamiliar. Analysis of these obstacles to success identifies the misconceptions responsible for them and suggests ways of steering the fledgling venture around them.