The Unicorn Within

Inside every company is a portfolio of game-changing new ventures waiting to be unleashed. It's become accepted wisdom that established companies can't build and scale new ventures the way startups can—after all, startups are lean and agile, while incumbents are too big, slow, and inflexible. But that's nonsense, and it's time to challenge that idea. In The Unicorn Within, Linda Yates, the founder and CEO of Silicon Valley–based Mach49, the world's leading growth incubator for the Global 1000, argues that to thrive, companies can and must harness their power—their ideas, talent, data, cash, resources, channels, and customers—to build a portfolio of game-changing ventures and beat the startups at their own game. In this all-in-one guide, Yates lays out a comprehensive twelve-week program, proven in scores of the world's largest companies, for doing all of the above: building a team and finding customer pain points; creating new products or services; developing a rigorous business and execution plan; and launching, accelerating, and scaling each venture. And then doing it again and again. She also shares a blueprint for building your own incubator and accelerator—your own growth engine—along with providing a robust, repeatable, and scalable process that also addresses the complexities and often paralyzing constraints of corporate bureaucracy. Best of all, Yates offers a guide relevant to everyone, from the growth-minded C-suite senior executive to the ambitious, creative intrapreneur, as she covers everything from selecting your new-venture team to creating a new-venture board—the senior executives who become the venture's internal VCs, helping to remove institutional friction and ensuring that every venture can reach escape velocity and thrive. Focused 100% on execution, the book is filled with methods, assessments, tools, scripts, and agendas illustrating every step. The Unicorn Within provides everything even the most established company needs to create high-growth new ventures that deliver compelling new products and services—and stay perpetually competitive in the face of relentless change.