The bosi framework, as defined by abraham, groups entrepreneurs into the following 4 categories:

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

Índice Show

2. Opportunist
3. Specialist
4. Innovator

As an angel investor, I get requests almost every day to review a new product or website, and provide feedback on its potential success. Yet I can't remember the last time any entrepreneur asked me to assess personal potential, despite the fact that most investors will admit they invest in the person more than the product. It is people who drive successful businesses.

Shutterstock

So it behooves every aspiring entrepreneur to understand their own DNA before picking a project to bet their life on, and to facilitate effective communication with all constituents, including partners, investors, team members and customers. We all have strengths and special interests, and it always pays to capitalize on these, rather than assume all opportunities are the same.

To confirm the value of checking yourself, I find more and more investment organizations and startup incubators, including StartupAmerica and CoFoundersLab, already use a formal process, such as StrengthsFinder, as part of their screening process. If they find your strengths are not consistent with the project you are bringing forward, their interest may come to an abrupt end.

Related: What Type of Entrepreneur Are You? (Infographic)

A newer methodology that seems to be gaining traction measures an entrepreneur's fit or DNA in each of four quadrants: Builder, Opportunist, Specialist and Innovator (BOSI). It was developed by Joe Abraham, who manages a portfolio of successful high-growth international companies. You can even check your own DNA with his self-assessment against the four key types:

1. Builder

The Builder excels at constructing a business from the ground up. These people are the ultimate chess players in the game of startups, always looking to be two or three moves ahead of the competition. They are usually described as driven, focused, cold, ruthless and calculating. Many might say Donald Trump epitomizes this category. They usually win, but don't often get the appreciation and happiness they crave.

2. Opportunist

The Opportunist is the dreamer in all of us. It's that part of us that maneuvers to be in the right place at the right time to make big money. If you ever felt enticed to jump into a quick money pitch on the Internet, that was your Opportunist side showing. These entrepreneurs dream big, go big and too often crash big.

3. Specialist

The Specialist entrepreneur will enter one industry and stick with it for a lifetime. They build strong expertise, but often struggle to stand out in a crowded marketplace of competitors. Picture the graphic designer, the IT expert or the independent accountant or attorney. These types of people start good family businesses, but can't scale.

Related: Do You Have Entrepreneurial DNA?

4. Innovator

You will usually find the Innovator entrepreneur in the lab working on their invention, recipe, concept, system or product that can be built into one or many businesses. The challenge with an Innovator is to focus as hard on the business realities as the product possibilities. If one of these entrepreneurs teams with a Builder, the sky is the limit, and every investor wants to get a piece of the action.

Of course, understanding your type and tailoring your plan is still no guarantee of success. The second principle that all investors live by is that successful businesses are also about execution, rather than the idea. That's why I also put major emphasis on startup traction, milestones achieved and metrics rather than listening again to how great it's going to be.

Nevertheless, I see tremendous value in understanding your entrepreneurial DNA, as part of your personal preparation, or in conjunction with incubators, accelerators or advisory boards. I am not convinced that any organization has the ultimate system to map your DNA to business success, with all the unknowns of a new business and personal idiosyncrasies, but it's a good start.

There is still no substitute for personal relationships and effective teams. That's why most angel investors only invest locally, where they can do that assessment of the founder and his team personally over time. Venture capital investors have the resources to travel to entrepreneurs with high potential.

So before you initiate your next startup, I recommend that you spend some time looking inward, or working with a mentor who will tell you where your strengths lie. At the very least, you can then find a co-founder who has complementary strengths, and prove the theory that one plus one equals three. All too often the alternative is that one plus zero ends up as zero.

Related: Determining Your Entrepreneur Style and Getting Past Your Business Blind Spots

CEOs talk about growth; markets demand it.1 But profitable organic growth is difficult. When core businesses begin to flag, research suggests that fewer than 5% of companies regain growth rates of at least 1% above gross domestic product.2 Creating new businesses, or corporate entrepreneurship, offers one increasingly potent solution. According to a recent survey, companies that put greater emphasis on creating new business models grew their operating margins faster than the competition.3

But how can established organizations build successful new businesses on an ongoing basis? Certainly, the road is littered with failures. The iPod should have been a Sony Corp. product. The Japanese corporation had the heritage, brand, technology, channels — everything. But it was Apple Inc.’s Steve Jobs who recognized that the potential of portable digital music could be unlocked only through the creation of a new business, not just a better MP3 player.

To investigate how organizations succeed at corporate entrepreneurship, we conducted a study at nearly 30 global companies (see “About the Research.”). Through that research, we were able to define four fundamental models of corporate entrepreneurship and identify factors guiding when each model should be applied. This framework of corporate entrepreneurship should help companies avoid costly trial-and-error mistakes in selecting and constructing the best program for their objectives.

Since the late 1990s, organizations as diverse as IBM, DuPont and Cargill have been developing new approaches to corporate entrepreneurship. To make sense of such initiatives, we asked those companies and others — nearly 30 — about numerous descriptive dimensions regarding their programs for creating new businesses. These dimensions ranged from contextual factors, such as market maturity and technology intensity, to the structural and cultural characteristics of the parent company, consistent with the dimensions commonly examined in the academic business literature. Our objective was to design a framework useful for managers and, after testing various approaches, we arrived at the framework described in this article.

First, though, what exactly is corporate entrepreneurship? We define the term as the process by which teams within an established company conceive, foster, launch and manage a new business that is distinct from the parent company but leverages the parent’s assets, market position, capabilities or other resources. It differs from corporate venture capital, which predominantly pursues financial investments in external companies.

Robert C. Wolcott is a fellow and adjunct assistant professor of innovation and entrepreneurship and Michael J. Lippitz is a research fellow with the Center for Research in Technology and Innovation at the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University, in Evanston, Illinois. Wolcott is also a cofounder of the strategic consultancy Clareo Partners LLC. Comment on this article or contact the authors through .

1. See, for instance, R. Gulati (introduction), “How CEOs Manage Growth Agendas,” Harvard Business Review 82 (July–August, 2004): 124–132.

2. Corporate Strategy Board, “Stall Points: Barriers to Growth for the Large Corporate Enterprise” (Washington, D.C.: Corporate Strategy Board, 1998).

3. G. Pohle and M. Chapman, “IBM Global CEO Study 2006: Business Model Innovation Matters,” Strategy and Leadership 34, no. 5 (2006): 34–40.

4. M. Sawhney, R.C. Wolcott and I. Arroniz, “The 12 Different Ways for Companies to Innovate,” MIT Sloan Management Review 47, no.3 (spring 2006): 75–81. Innovation in technologies or products might actually be just a small part of creating business value; Starbucks Corp., for example, generates innovations in customer experience. Companies can innovate on any aspect of how they do business, but it all has to fit together as a coherent system.

5. See, in particular, M.L. Tushman and C.A. O’Reilly III, “The Ambidextrous Organization: Managing Evolutionary and Revolutionary Change,” California Management Review 38, no. 4 (summer 1996): 8–30.

6. Ibid.

7. Founded in 1927, Zimmer has 6,700 employees, operations in more than 24 countries and sales of approximately $3.5 billion in 2006. It was spun off from Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. in August 2001, becoming independent again for the first time in 30 years.

8. With nearly 150,000 employees, Cargill operates in more than 60 countries and generated income of $1.5 billion on revenues of $75 billion in fiscal 2006 (ending May 31).

9. C.M. Christensen and M.E. Raynor, “The Innovator’s Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth” (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2003).

10. Internal (nonconfidential) IBM presentation, February 2006, Armonk, New York.

The authors thank Mohanbir Sawhney for his recommendations in the preparation of this article, and they are grateful to Henry Pak and Geof-frey Nudd for their efforts on behalf of this research.