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This paper aims to expand the understanding of the design thinking (DT) field and provides evidence that DT as an innovation mindset centered on user/human needs is able to lead enterprises to the development of radical product innovation.

The study is based on an illustrative case analysis of four eras of radical innovations in the watch industry, from the mechanical wristwatches to smartwatches.

The findings from the watch industry substantiate the developed DT triangle framework for designers, managers and executives, enabling the development of radical product innovation.

The study provides evidence for the claim that human-centered approach (rather than design-driven, meaning-changing approach) in DT can successfully lead to radical product innovations. For this, this paper distinguishes between “need” and “meaning” in the DT field and reemphasize the role of creating empathy with users to be able to identify their newly shaped needs. Fulfilling these newly shaped needs would ultimately result in the development of radically new products.

Scholars have extensively studied the concept of strategic entrepreneurship (SE), shedding light on its antecedents, dynamics and outcomes. However, a notable gap exists in understanding the reliability of its performance implications, which explains the inherent risks as well as the possibility of yielding outliers (instances of exceptionally high or low performance). Addressing this gap, this study aims to present a detailed analysis of the implications of SE for the variance of resulting performance distribution.

This conceptual study uses the deductive theory-building approach to dissect the four dimensions of SE (entrepreneurial mindset, entrepreneurial leadership and culture, managing resources strategically and applying creativity and developing innovations) as presented by Ireland et al.’s (2003) model, offering theoretical propositions on how each of them influences the variability of resulting performance distribution.

This study demonstrates that the strategic entrepreneurship (SE) dimensions have distinct impacts on the reliability/variability of performance outcomes, acting as boosters or attenuators in the volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous (VUCA) context.

The study uniquely links each component of SE with outcome variability in VUCA environments, thereby shifting the focus from traditional performance metrics to outcome variability. This approach complements the existing body of knowledge on the performance implications of the SE construct by integrating a previously neglected critical perspective on the reliability of resulting performance distribution. These insights allow subsequent investigation of SE’s outcomes, including explaining the likelihood of obtaining positive outlier performance or firm failure.

The article introduces the Entrepreneurial Management System (EMS), which delineates a strategic process within an organizational context that is aimed at encouraging and supporting the pursuit of opportunities that have the potential to create value through innovative strategic actions. It is designed to stimulate entrepreneurial thinking and corporate venturing at all levels.

The authors offer an approach to organization-wide continuous innovation that incorporates proven concepts from existing research with lessons learned from the authors’ research analysis and consulting experience in helping large and medium companies across different industries and markets to establish effective entrepreneurial management.

Given the spectre of constant disruption from new technologies or business models, management teams will be judged on how they proactively respond to these challenges by turning them into value-creating opportunities.

Multidisciplinary teams allow employees to become familiar with other domains and see possible solutions, share their problems and ideas and vet their insights with the input of colleagues.

An Entrepreneurial Management System allows a firm to "internalize" the marketplace’s evolutionary processes so that a company can generate, develop and implement ideas that will have value for customers. It should be a clear decision for all of today’s business leaders and investors to have an implementation plan to ensure continuous innovation.

While a radical innovation can be embedded in new products or new processes, most studies to date have concentrated on barriers to radical product innovations, with little insights available about the challenges for implementation of radical process innovations.

We theorize a set of barriers to radical process innovation based on a critical case study of an oil company. Our study employs data from 14 semi-structured interviews, one complete participant-observer in the process and access to all corporate documentation. The organization being studied was eventually unable to bring the new process technology to commercialization despite the technology having both technical feasibility and substantive cost savings potential.

We identify five groups of challenges that the company faced: (1) challenges in resource mobilization, (2) challenges in piloting strategy, (3) innovation leadership tensions, (4) tensions in managing shareholders' expectations and (5) product-process innovation tension (i.e. a unique situation when a company implementing a radical process innovation and simultaneously pursues the path to commercialize it as a product innovation).

Sustainable development is one of the major challenges in our era. Process innovations are crucial for achieving sustainability without changing the final product. By providing a list of challenges that executives face in the process of commercializing a radical process innovation, we can help them to achieve sustainability more effectively.

The paper responds to the call to increase our understanding of radical process innovations by utilizing a unique ethnographic research methodology of active participant-observation complemented by independent third-party face-to-face interviews.