Managing Innovation, 6th Edition

CHAPTER 2 Innovation as a Core Business Process

Innovation, the core renewal process within an organization (as described in Chapter 1), is a generic activity associated with survival and growth. At this level of abstraction, we can see the underlying process as common to all firms. The challenge facing any organization is to find the ways of managing the innovation process to provide a good solution for the problem of renewal or refreshing of the essence, creation, and delivery of a firm’s offerings. At its heart, innovation involves

• Searching Scanning the (internal and external) environment for and processing relevant signals about threats and opportunities for change.
• Selecting Deciding (based on a strategic view of how the enterprise can best develop) which of these signals to respond to.
• Implementing Translating the potential in the trigger idea into something new and launching it in an internal or external market. Making this happen is not a single event but requires eventually acquiring the knowledge resources to enable the innovation, executing the project under conditions of uncertainty (which require extensive problem-solving), and launching the innovation into relevant internal or external markets.
• Capturing value from the innovation In terms of sustaining adoption and diffusion and in learning from progressing through this cycle so that the organization can ...