How Do Large Companies Manage Their Investments Across the Three Horizons?

Abstract

Technical entrepreneurship continues to be important to a technology company’s health and growth, even after it has successfully delivered its first product. It is essential to help the company deal with competitive forces and to renew its revenue stream. However, as the company grows, its entrepreneurial capability often becomes handicapped both by company culture as well as external pressures. The company must achieve the right mix of investment and level of attention across three time horizons of growth: immediate, imminent, and future. This balancing act requires a commitment to a strategic growth goal, appropriate tools, and leaders that can manage significant degrees of uniqueness in the resources that address each of these time horizons. This article discusses some of the horizon-management challenges faced by top management teams of large companies and overviews some mechanisms and processes that have worked effectively. Large companies must overcome internal teams’ divergent values and culture as well as significant external, short-term pressures being applied by their existing base of customers and markets. Discipline at the entry point to Horizon 3 (exploratory phase) and then a rapid transition to Horizon 1 (current operations) is the priority of any successful growth company.

Keywords

• horizon management
• investment
• large companies
• technology entrepreneurship