Radical innovation through internal corporate venturing: Degussa's commercialization of nanomaterials
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Internal corporate venturing enables radical innovation within established firms in mature markets. Without effectively designed and managed internal corporate ventures, the organizational constraints of established firms will strongly favour incremental innovation over radical innovation. This paper investigates the evolution of a successful internal corporate venture within a large, incumbent chemical firm, now known as Evonik Degussa, to reveal the challenges, organizational design, and management strategies of their commercialization of radical nanomaterials technology. The commercialization of nanomaterials technology is of great interest to incumbent materials and chemical firms and to independent ventures, but the radical, generic, and capital intensive nature of nanomaterials technology requires organizational and managerial innovation. This case study demonstrates a model to enable growth through radical innovation in nanomaterials, while taking advantage of an incumbent firm's capabilities and complementary assets. Organizational strategies include incubation from a risk‐adverse culture, relatively long timelines for evaluation, and a high‐level steering committee. Managerial strategies focus on product development, risk reduction, and active risk management.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".