Search results

In a session of the Strategos Innovation Academy, participants considered how a number of core management processes – for example, strategic planning, capital budgeting, performance assessment and product and process development – inhibit innovation. Working in groups, the participants identified problems with existing practices and then suggested a number of ways to make the process less toxic to innovation. Today’s strategic‐planning processes rarely emphasize radical innovation – the new business concepts and operational models that are necessary to keep corporations at the head of the pack – either implicitly or explicitly. Another failure that participants identified is the linkage between strategy planning and the annual budgetary cycle. To improve strategic planning, participants made a number of other suggestions, many of which derive from the toxicities and failures of the existing strategic‐planning process. Companies should first ensure that their business definition and associated mission statement are broad. Narrow definitions are likely to reduce a company’s identity to its current business model, thereby impeding the possibility of renewal. Companies should also explicitly include innovation in the strategic‐planning process. A chief innovation officer – a new senior‐level appointee in the company – can help ensure that innovation remains central to the strategic‐planning process. Greater scrutiny of strategic plans can also help. For example, CEOs can reject strategic plans that do not include a substantial amount of innovation. The introduction of new metrics for innovation would help formalize this commitment to innovation. Participants also recommended that companies find ways to dissociate the strategic‐planning process from an annual schedule. Instead, the process needs to become continuous. To this end, some participants advocated renaming the process strategic evolution instead of strategic planning.

The corporate boundaries that matter today are the boundaries that define and contain the corporation’s innovation searches. This article examines how innovation can be extended outside the traditional corporate boundary. After identifying several factors that are driving extended innovation ‐‐ and, in so doing, changing the value‐creating nature of the firm ‐‐ the authors present extended innovation strategies for companies in either mature industries (where the industry structure is established( or emerging opportunity spaces (where the competitive structure and industry dynamics have yet to crystallize). In mature industries such as retail, new ideas are most likely to be found in the “white spaces” between companies. Companies should pursue these opportunities through cross‐company alliances that recombine assets and competencies. In emerging spaces such as biotechnology, where the locations of opportunities are unknown, companies should pursue explorative collaborations that emphasize low‐cost probing and learning.

The three authors of this paper are intrigued by ideas and how they are created. The purpose of this paper is to explore idea creation and work by means of remote collaborative autoethnography.

During the COVID-19 lockdown in 2020, the authors sent texts to each other, followed up on each other's thoughts and discussed them in online meetings. They shared, analyzed and eventually theorized their lived experiences in order to understand creating ideas as social and cultural experience.

The authors develop the notions of “shelter” and “crutch” to make sense of the complexity of creating ideas together; theorize how emotions and identities are entangled in idea work; and discuss how time, space and power relations condition it.

The authors contribute to understanding idea work in a remote collaborative autoethnography by highlighting its emotional, identity-related and power-laden nature.

Will your company be like so many “one‐hit” wonders that failed because of their inability to adapt through innovation? Many companies meet this fate. Management shortfalls on the path to developing new market successes include: (1) A lack of the requisite skills and resources to sustain growth; (2) A CEO’s preoccupation with the existing business. This latter case should quickly be challenged given that the business environment will ultimately render any business concept an anachronism. The only way for a company to sustain itself is through conceiving and nurturing new business ideas that can succeed for the parent business; (3) Either no genuine product innovations, or so few the company does not develop the skill to cultivate them; (4) Entry into the innovation phase too late, such as in Polaroid’s case; (5) Belief that an investment in a new business cannot coexist with the existing business. The company sees true innovative concepts as more as a nuisance or threat to their comfortable lives than as the offer of hope for a new future; (7) The ability to create an abundance of innovation but exhibit a peculiar incompetence in creating a market for it. Witness Xerox. The challenge, then, is to foster a capability for innovation – not merely product enhancement. This capability allows a company to migrate from one business concept to the next as the market changes and opportunities emerge.

There is a dearth of research addressing network failures, and in particular failures of large-scale organizational networks that pursue radical innovation or grand challenges through collaboration. Yet these failures manifestly exist with potential learnings for network participants. In this chapter, the authors consider three major network failures that have been identified in prior research and in the ongoing empirical work. The authors term the failures stalling – not getting started in collaborative work, strategizing – using the network opportunistically to serve other goals than what the network was formed for, and siloing – the network falling short of its collective capacity to learn and innovate due to its lack of connectivity and communication. After describing these three seminal failures in networks of independent organizations, the authors consider the implications for high ambition network collaboration – whether radical innovation or a grand challenge. The authors ask: what do these failures suggest in terms of network participation that would help contribute to network realizing its objective? How should the individual participants of these large-scale organizational networks mitigate failure and maintain the founding ambition, and the performance of the network? What available models for learning are there for the network participants?

This paper focuses on the famous productivity paradox ‐ despite widespread investments in information technologies, very few of them can be shown to positively impact the productivity statistics. The authors argue that the way out of the productivity paradox is to transition out of traditional investments in information processing technologies, offering diminishing returns, to investments in knowledge technologies, offering increasing returns. They argue that such a shift, in order to be effective, must be built with a core focus on meeting the users’ needs in knowledge work. Topics reviewed include knowledge retrieval, including knowledge servers and their architecture; knowledge capture; and knowledge navigation and discovery. The paper concludes with an assessment of emerging knowledge technologies.

This case aims to look at a small start‐up car maker called Loremo, Inc. in Marl, Germany, that hopes to thrive by challenging resource constraints with bold innovation.

The authors found Loremo as part of their five‐year long study looking at how innovation manages to flourish in firms despite resource scarcity.

The paper finds that Loremo engineers had no other choice but to make virtue of necessity, to develop their car with existing technology and affordable materials, but to reconsider the traditional principles of automobile engineering, which other companies take for granted.

The authors are doing research on companies that achieve bold innovation despite limited resources.

The Loremo engineers overcame the costly process that results from taking a “design stance,” a commitment to design parts to do a particular job.

Manufacturers in all the developed countries that are struggling with the need for radical innovation might take number of lessons from the tiny Loremo car company.

This paper aims to contend that to achieve the resilience needed to thrive long‐term in a dynamic, highly competitive marketplace companies need to commit to continual customer‐focused agility training.

The paper uses “Big Brown Box Inc.”, which is a disguised case about a real company's practices and experiences.

The paper reveals that training for resilience involves mastering three strategic management practices: cultivating foresight, rehearsing non‐routine behaviors and building an experimentation‐oriented community.

The takeaway from the Big Brown Box Inc. example is that all companies need to continually exercise their operational resilience to prepare for setbacks and the maneuvers of rivals.

The paper reveals that the rehearsing and training exercises needed to develop resilience will help an organization learn how to proactively engage in exploration and experimentation.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce a model of “rapid execution innovation” designed to increase the likelihood of achieving the kind of breakthroughs that develop into successful new business models developed by the authors.

Their recent field experience indicates that companies should scrap the comforting safety of new product planning and stage‐gate schedules. Instead, company leaders should learn to practice high‐speed innovation experimentation, from ideation to operational execution, in order to offer products and services with unique customer benefits.

In their model, companies start this process by conducting experiments that promote a radical rethinking of a business opportunity and then continue experimenting as the original idea evolves into a product.

This paper draws on an ambitious research project in Finland called MIND (Managing Industry‐Changing Innovations, see www.mindspace.fi), which seeks to “make Finland the world leader in strategic business innovation.”

This is a sample how‐to; practical experiments show whether the fundamental assumptions about radical innovation are correct.

Although seemingly simple, such an experimental approach to business model innovation is rarely practiced even in businesses dedicated to innovation.