THE UNICORN WITHIN

It's not unusual for books from Harvard Business Review Press to come across like playbooks for the easy reference management professionals. After all, management is an applied field, so even when distilling crucial learnings at the frontiers of management thinking, it's more than likely that the material will have a practical bent.

Even by that standard, Linda Yates' The Unicorn Within: How Companies Can Create Game-Changing Ventures at Startup Speed is on a completely different level.

The Unicorn Within is a book about venture building and how large companies can (and should!) work to nurture completely new businesses as part of their strategic direction. Of course, this is easier said than done. But Yates' experience with the consultancy firm Mach49 demonstrates that it is possible.

"[T]here is a better chance of ran internally generated and incubated new startup to succeed than an independent one," Yates argues seemingly in contradiction to the lived experience of many a C-suite executive. But she makes a compelling case. Founders of independent startups are usually lazer-focused on a market opportunity that they believe they can solve but tend to be starved of the resources to allow their business to scale. In contrast, established businesses have an abundance of resources but have their attention dedicated to the needs of a going concern. On that basis, it stands to reason that what businesses need to reap the benefits of nurturing startups is a workable framework to do so.

It's precisely that framework that Yates presents in The Unicorn Within.

In that sense, the book is hyperdetailed about the rationale, structure, and methodology for a business to set up its own "venture factory" capable of taking a startup to scale within a given twelve-week period. As playbooks go it's certainly an aggressive one and arguably will only apply as described to a small subset of companies in very specific circumstances in the developed world. Nonetheless, The Unicorn Within presents a viable model that can give long-established companies the confidence that they overcome the pull of their legacy business to nurture new business ideas and full-fledged startups.

Unique approach to intrapreneurship is something that many companies are lacking. There are many books on helping entrepreneurs to succeed however this book has focus on innovation and starting from idea to business launch within an established corporate environment.