Description
Corporate entrepreneurship has always been an essential engine of growth and renewal, but its focus has been to drive sustaining innovations in core businesses. CEOs increasingly recognize the need to harness corporate entrepreneurship to catalyze disruptive innovation in adjacent markets, yet research indicates that few are confident they know how to lead this transition. Lou Musante, Echo Strategies, and Sean Ammirati, Professor, Tepper Business School / Director & Co-Founder, Corporate Startup Lab / Partner, Birchmere Ventures, will share their findings on the current state of play for corporate entrepreneurship and their upcoming project, which aims to accelerate the transformation of corporate entrepreneurship capabilities by identifying best practices executives and high-level managers can use to focus and support their organization’s non-incremental innovation initiatives.
Contributors
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Sean Ammirati, Adjunct Professor of Entrepreneurship, Carnegie Mellon University Corporate Startup Lab
Sean Ammirati is a Venture Capitalist, Professor, and Author.
Sean Ammirati joined Birchmere Ventures as a Partner in 2012. Birchmere focuses on seed-stage SaaS and marketplace startup investments. The firm is headquartered in Pittsburgh with a second office in San Francisco.
Prior to joining Birchmere, Sean spent 12 years founding, building and selling businesses in the software and media industries. He was Chief Operating Officer of ReadWriteWeb acquired by the private-equity rollup SAY Media to strengthen its technology channel. Prior to that, Sean was the co-founder and CEO of mSpoke, which was LinkedIn's first acquisition. His first startup was Peak Strategy, which was acquired by Morgan Stanley.
Sean is an Adjunct Professor of Entrepreneurship at Carnegie Mellon University’s Tepper School of Business and Heinz College. He is also the Co-Founder and Director of the Carnegie Mellon Corporate Startup Lab. With the Corporate Startup Lab, Sean has conducted research and developed tools to help companies better adapt and integrate entrepreneurial best practices into their own innovation processes. The frameworks and tools have helped innovators become more successful entrepreneurs and helped leaders better encourage entrepreneurship and manage their innovation portfolios. The two CSL Co-Founders (Sean and Matt Crespi) also developed and teach a unique project course on corporate entrepreneurship, in which diverse teams of graduate students partner with large companies to test and develop real startup ideas brought by the corporations.
He recently completed his first book The Science of Growth, which was released by St Martin's Press in April 2016 and was subsequently translated into Korean and Mandarin.
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Lou Musante, Echo Strategies
Serial entrepreneur and research designer who spent the 1970’s and early 1980’s working in large global corporations. He started his first company in 1984 and has launched and helped launch dozens of others. His background is in chemistry with a master’s in information science. Areas of focus: research design and product development, digital transformations, design thinking, innovation leadership and strategy, performance measurement, collaboration methods, creating disruptive innovations using SaaS-PaaS and corporate entrepreneurship. He Vice President of Growth @ Echo Strategies and lectures at the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Melon University. Lou has been an advisor to the Corporate Startup Lab at CMU since inception.