Radical Innovation: How Mature Companies Can Outsmart Upstarts explores how established organizations can successfully create, develop, and commercialize breakthrough innovations.
It’s well known that large mature businesses struggle repeatedly to commercialize breakthrough opportunities, even those they invent or license. The problem is not that executives fail to recognize the need, it's a lack of understanding of what to do and how to do it. This groundbreaking book reveals the patterns through which game-changing innovation occurs in large, established companies, and identifies the new managerial competencies firms need to make radical innovation happen. These projects are nurtured within the established organization, not skunkworks. They are not concerned with exploiting current lines of business, but with exploring entirely new ones. Based on evidence from a five-year, real time study of twelve radical innovation projects within ten major corporations, this book addresses seven challenges project leaders in large companies face. The authors distill a comprehensive, interdisciplinary approach to mastering each of these challenges, from the conceptualization of viable ideas to the commercialization of radical innovations. Designed to push the envelope of thinking about the most significant challenge facing large companies today, this important book offers a revolutionary new paradigm for long-term corporate success.
Grabbing Lightning: Building a Capability for Breakthrough Innovation examines how established organizations can build the systems and capabilities needed to sustain breakthrough innovation.
Established companies are clamoring for breakthrough innovation, but are often hamstrung by the highly reliable, repeatable processes of their management systems. Based on years of research, Grabbing Lightning shows how twelve companies have approached developing a capability for sustainable breakthrough innovation and outlines best practices for your organization. The authors show how the management system for innovation is different from the traditional one in that it allows for the context of high uncertainty, and recognizes that the organizational structures, metrics, talent management, objectives, practices and leadership culture must all be designed to promote learning and maintain a steady focus on a set of envisioned futures. Grabbing Lightning outlines the three building blocks of breakthrough innovation (BI) and shows what it takes to become an organization that experiences ongoing organizational renewal through innovating around big, complex opportunity spaces whose solutions offer dramatic benefits to the market.
Beyond the Champion: Institutionalizing Innovation Through People presents a research-based framework for talent management, a key stumbling block for mature companies aspiring to develop sustainable strategic innovation capabilities.
Large, mature companies often struggle when it comes to the uncertain process of breakthrough innovation. But innovation is an imperative in today's cutthroat business environment. To fulfill its potential, there has to be a better way—and there is. Beyond the Champion argues that innovation is a talent all its own that requires distinct skills and expertise, just like finance or marketing. Viewing innovation as a discipline in its own right, it is easy to see that breakthrough wins require an organizational design with clearly delineated roles, responsibilities, and career tracks for those who shoulder the responsibility for new products. Drawing on the results of a four-year study and two decades of related research, this book outlines three fundamental competencies necessary for innovation: discovery, incubation, and acceleration. Mapping these skills onto roles and opportunities for advancement, the authors deliver a pioneering blueprint for sustainable innovation. The book offers practical guidance for executives, innovation leaders, and organizations seeking to build lasting strategic innovation capabilities through people.