No matter how well you do following this process, the majority of your initiatives are not going to be great commercial successes. The first issue about disengagement is recognizing that it's necessary and that requires some judgment. Nokia has developed a system where technologies that were originally developed in a venture could be migrated somewhere else.
To plan for the future, businesses usually look to their past. But what if your company is in uncharted territory? Columbia Business School professor Rita McGrath has a different idea: Design experiments to test your assumptions using “discovery-driven growth.”