Everybody knows that large enterprises do not innovate and do not create new businesses. And everybody also knows that the overwhelming majority of new businesses created in those two highly entrepreneurial decades, the 1980s and the 1990s, were built by individual entrepreneurs, starting on their own. AND EVERYBODY IS WRONG.

The great majority of new businesses during the last decades of the twentieth century (but equally in the decades before them, that is since World War II) were created and built by existing enterprises, and in large part by big or at least fair-sized ones. And when it comes to successful new businesses, the proportion initiated and built by existing enterprises is even larger. The casualty rate is, of course, high for all new businesses. But it is vastly lower for those started, developed and nurtured by existing enterprises and, in fact, within an existing business.

However, new business creation within the existing business, commonly called corporate entrepreneurship, requires leadership from the top. The successful “intrapreneur” who creates a new business at the bottom – and without senior-management support, if not without its knowledge – is largely pure fiction. Successful corporate entrepreneurship requires strong, active, determined leadership on the part of the company's CEO, on the part of its senior managers, on the part of the chief operating executives such as the division general manager in the large decentralized company.