CECG Overview
The Center for Entrepreneurship and Corporate Growth was formed in the winter of 2003 to focus on the issues of growth across the life of a business.
Background
Most university entrepreneurship centers focus almost exclusively on new venture creation with research and teaching initiatives related to the challenges of start-ups, the creation of business plans, and the acquisition of financing. In conceptualizing our center, we began with recognized Goizueta Business School faculty strengths in the areas of creativity, innovation, growth and organizational change.
As we surveyed companies and reviewed the academic and practitioner literatures, we identified a central challenge shared by many firms at differing stages of development related to growth. Large established firms were struggling to find new sources of growth from new products, new services, or even entirely new businesses as they matured. Interestingly, much smaller post start-up but pre-IPO firms were also struggling to identify their initial source of growth and if successful, how to manage extremely high rates of growth. Given the fit of Goizueta Business School’s research capabilities with this demonstrated need, we are now uniquely positioned as the only Center dedicated to the research, teaching and programmatic initiatives related to the challenges of growth across the life-cycle of a firm.
Mission
Our focus has been to understand the challenges of:
- Organic growth in very large public companies such as the Coca-Cola Company, Home Depot, P&G and others
- Managing high growth in private, entrepreneurial companies.