Large global companies need to speed up their innovation activities to increase competitive advantage. However, such companies' organizational structures impede their ability to capture trends they are well aware of due to bureaucracy, slow decision-making, distributed departments, and distributed processes. One way to strengthen the innovation capability is through fostering internal startups. We report findings from an embedded multiple-case study of five internal startups in a globally distributed company to identify barriers for software product innovation: late involvement of software developers, executive sponsor is missing or not clarified, yearly budgeting and planning, unclear decision-making authority, lack of digital infrastructure for experimentation and access to data from external actors. Drawing on the framework of continuous software engineering proposed by Fitzgerald and Stol, we discuss the role of BizDev in software product innovation. We suggest that lack of continuity, rather than the lack of speed, is an ultimate challenge for internal startups in large global companies.
翻译:大型全球公司需要加快创新活动,以增加竞争优势。然而,由于官僚主义、决策缓慢、分布式部门和分布式流程,这些公司的组织结构妨碍了它们掌握自己所熟知的趋势的能力。加强创新能力的一个途径是培养内部创业。我们报告对一家全球分布式公司五个内部创业企业进行的嵌入式多重案例研究的结果,以找出软件产品创新的障碍:软件开发商的参与过迟,执行赞助人缺乏或没有得到澄清,每年的预算和规划不够明确,决策权不明确,缺乏用于试验和获取外部行为者数据的数码基础设施。我们借鉴菲茨杰拉德和斯托尔提出的软件连续工程框架,讨论BizDev在软件产品创新中的作用。我们指出,缺乏连续性,而不是缺乏速度,是大型全球公司内部创业面临的最终挑战。