Chapter 13: Strategic Entrepreneurship 429
13-6b Facilitating Integration and Innovation
Shared values and effective leadership are important for achieving cross-functional inte-
gration and implementing internal innovations.^100 As part of culture, shared values are
framed around the firm’s vision and mission and become the glue that promotes integra-
tion between functional units.
Strategic leadership is also important to efforts to achieve cross-functional integra-
tion and promote internal innovation. Working with others, leaders are responsible for
setting goals and allocating resources needed to achieve them. The goals include inte-
grated development and commercialization of new products. Effective strategic leaders
also ensure a high-quality communication system to facilitate cross-functional integra-
tion. A critical benefit of effective communication is the sharing of knowledge among
team members, who in turn are then able to communicate an innovation’s existence and
importance to others in the organization. Shared values and leadership practices shape
the communication routines that make it possible to share innovation-related knowledge
throughout the firm.^101
13-6c Creating Value from Internal Innovation
The model in Figure 13.2 shows how firms seek to create value through internal innova-
tion processes (autonomous strategic behavior and induced strategic behavior). As shown,
an entrepreneurial mind-set is foundational to the firm’s efforts to consistently identify
entrepreneurial opportunities that it can pursue strategically with and through innova-
tions. Cross-functional teams are important for promoting integrated new product design
ideas and gaining commitment to their subsequent implementation. Effective leadership
and shared values promote integration and vision for innovation and commitment to it.
The end result of successful innovations is the creation of value for stakeholders such as
customers and shareholders.^102 However, competitive rivalry (see Chapter 5) affects the
degree of success a firm achieves through its innovations. Thus, firms must carefully
Figure 13.2 Creating Value through Internal Innovation Processes
Cross-functional
product development
teams
Entrepreneurial
mind-set
Creating value
through innovation
Facilitating integration
and innovation
- Shared values
- Entrepreneurial
leadership
