Managing the New Venture Division: Research Findings and Implications for Strategic Management

The New Venture Division (NVD), an important organizational innovation to facilitate corporate entrepreneurship, so far has been used with mixed success, Systematic differences in terms of administrative processes, strategy-making, and participants’ orientations create problems in the interfaces between the NVD and the rest of the corporation. Using the NVS as a vehicle for consolidating, rather than managing, autonomous strategic behavior exacerbates its already unstable position in the corporate context. Top management should recognize the experimentation-and-selection aspect of strategy-making involved in new venture activity, and should determine more completely the structural and strategic contexts in which it takes shape.