Dieses Open-Access-Buch vermittelt praxisnahes Wissen über Konzepte und Methoden für das Innovationsmanagement in kleinen und mittleren Unternehmen (KMU). Es werden Lösungsansätze für ...Herausforderungen im gesamten Innovationsprozess – von der strategischen Orientierung über Ideengewinnung, -bewertung und auswahl bis zur Umsetzung – aufgezeigt. Der Hauptfokus liegt auf dem Umgang mit Ambidextrie: Vorhandene Ressourcen sind zu nutzen, um das Tagesgeschäft effizient zu bewältigen und inkrementelle Innovationen zu entwickeln (Exploitation). Gleichzeitig soll offen nach ganz neuen und oftmals radikalen Innovationen gesucht werden (Exploration). Ein Kapitel zeigt, wie KMU ihr Innovationsmanagement auf das Thema Nachhaltigkeit ausrichten können. Auf der Webseite der Hochschule Pforzheim finden sich zahlreiche vertiefende Zusatzmaterialien. Der Inhalt Strategische Orientierung/Problemidentifizierung Ideengewinnung, -bewertung, -auswahl und -umsetzung Ambidextrie und das hybride Vorgehen Zukunft des Innovationsmanagements: Nachhaltigkeit
To develop innovations in large, mature organizations, individuals often have to resort to underground, “bootleg” research and development (R&D) activities that have no formal organizational support. ...In doing so, these individuals attempt to achieve greater autonomy over the direction of their R&D efforts and to escape the constraints of organizational accountability. Drawing on theories of proactive creativity and innovation, we argue that these underground R&D efforts help individuals to develop innovations based on the exploration of uncharted territory and delayed assessment of embryonic ideas. After carefully assessing the direction of causality, we find that individuals’ bootleg efforts are associated with achievement of high levels of innovative performance. Furthermore, we show that the costs and benefits of bootlegging for innovation are contingent on the emphasis on the enforcement of organizational norms in the individual’s work environment; we argue and demonstrate empirically that the benefits of an individual’s bootlegging efforts are enhanced in work units with high levels of innovative performance and which include members who are also engaged in bootlegging. However, during periods of organizational change involving formalization of the R&D process, individuals who increase their bootlegging activities are less likely to innovate. We explore the implications of these findings for our understanding of proactive and deviant creativity.
•Generalises the definition of innovation in the business sector to all economic sectors.•Uses the System of National Accounts for definitions of economic sectors.•Uses a systems approach to the ...analysis of innovation.•Examines policy implications of measuring innovation in all sectors.
This paper combines general definitions of innovation applicable in all economic sectors with a systems approach, to develop a conceptual framework for the statistical measurement of innovation. The resulting indicators can be used for monitoring and evaluation of innovation policies that have been implemented, as well as for international comparisons. The extension of harmonised innovation measurement to all economic sectors has implications for innovation research and for policy learning.
Prior research concerning IT business value has established a link between firm-level IT investment and tangible returns such as output productivity. Research also suggests that IT is vital to ...intermediate processes such as those that produce intangible output. Among these, the use of IT in innovation and knowledge creation processes is perhaps the most critical to a firm's long-term success. However, little is known about the relationship between IT, knowledge creation, and innovation output. In this study, we contribute to the literature by comprehensively examining the contribution of IT to innovation production across multiple contexts using a quality-based measure of innovation output. Analyzing annual information from 1987 to 1997 for a panel of large U.S. manufacturing firms, we find that a 10% increase in IT input is associated with a 1.7% increase in innovation output for a given level of innovation-related spending. This relationship between IT, research and development (R&D), and innovation production is robust across multiple econometric methodologies and is found to be particularly strong in the mid to late 1990s, a period of rapid technological innovation. Our results also demonstrate the importance of IT in creating value at an intermediate stage of production, in this case, through improved innovation productivity. However, R&D and its related intangible factors (skill, knowledge, etc.) appear to play a more crucial role in the creation of breakthrough innovations.
The current study attempts to broaden our understanding of the processes underlying successful innovation in family firms by studying not only research and development (R&D) but also organizational ...flexibility as drivers of innovation performance. Building on existing theoretical and empirical work, we formulate hypotheses on the relationship between family ownership and R&D and organizational flexibility, and on how this translates into successful innovation. Using a sample of 2604 firms and 3140-year observations, we find that family firms engage less in R&D, but are more flexible in the way they organize and that this organizational flexibility enables them to successfully develop new products and even outperform non-family owned businesses when it comes to process innovation. This research contributes to the family business field by disentangling R&D and organizational flexibility as processes underlying the relationship between family ownership and innovation performance. It illustrates how family firms' organizational flexibility can result in an innovation advantage and thereby has important implications for practitioners.
This is the first Open Access book introducing more than 20 of Japan’s leading innovative entrepreneurs from the 17th century to the present. The author outlines the innovative business models ...created by entrepreneurs including SoftBank’s Masayoshi Son, Fast Retailing (Uniqlo)’s Yanai Tadashi, Honda’s Soichiro Honda, Sony’s Akio Morita, Panasonic’s Konosuke Matsushita, and Toyota’s Kiichiro Toyoda, as well as their predecessors including Takatoshi Mitsui of Mitsui Zaibatsu, Shibusawa Eiichi of Daiichi Bank. While introducing the innovators, the author also raises three broader questions: 1. Why did Japan industrialize earlier than any other country outside Europe and the United States? 2. Why was Japan able to realize unsurpassed economic growth between the 1910s and the 1980s? 3. Why has Japan’s economy stagnated for more than 30 years since the 1990s? Drawing upon analytical concepts including Schumpeter’s breakthrough innovation, Kirzner’s incremental innovation, and Christensen’s disruptive innovation, the author contends that Japan’s successes were based on unique and systematic breakthrough innovation and an accumulation of incremental innovation, while it later fell victim to a combination of breakthrough innovation from advanced countries and disruptive innovation by developing nations.
This paper provides the first formal model of business model innovation. Our analysis focuses on sponsor-based business model innovations where a firm monetizes its product through sponsors rather ...than setting prices to its customer base. We analyze strategic interactions between an innovative entrant and an incumbent where the incumbent may imitate the entrant's business model innovation once it is revealed. The results suggest that an entrant needs to strategically choose whether to reveal its innovation by competing through the new business model, or conceal it by adopting a traditional business model. We also show that the value of business model innovation may be so substantial that an incumbent may prefer to compete in a duopoly rather than to remain a monopolist.
In this study of the U.S. automobile industry, we highlight the way the division of innovative labor across firms in the supply chain can be influenced by a particular form of digital innovation ...known as “digital control systems.” Digital control systems are becoming ubiquitous in complex products, and these digital innovations integrate other components across a product structure and introduce a level of indeterminacy and unpredictability in the organization of the interfirm division of innovative labor. Much of organizational scholarship holds that accompanying a shift toward increasingly modular product structures, component suppliers are engaging in relatively more design and invention around the components that they supply. We find that the evolution of digital controls may reverse this pattern, because in the wake of a major shift in the digital controls technology, suppliers actually engage in relatively less component innovation in comparison with their large manufacturing customers. To explain this shift, we characterize complex product structures in terms of two distinct product hierarchies: the inclusionary and the digital control hierarchy. In using this distinction to analyze the evolution of automotive emission control systems from 1970 to 1998, we reconcile two competing views about the interfirm division of innovative labor.
Social innovation is related to new products, services, and models aiming to improve human well-being and create social relationships and collaborations. The business model innovation (BMI) context ...can foster social innovation and can be applied in social innovation projects and initiatives. What is important for social BMI is the social mission, which needs to be defined in order to be able to move forward with the strategy, the value proposition, and the best practices of the business. Based on the existing social innovation literature and case studies, this paper proposes an "ecosystem" approach that can provide an integrated framework for social business models. This approach adopts the quadruple/quintuple helix innovation models which are able to promote social innovation, enabling a locus-centric and triple-bottom-line-centric entrepreneurial process of knowledge discovery and exploitation. Such a framework may help to study the role, nature, and dynamics of social co-opetitive fractal ecosystems, given emphasis on civil society, political structures, environment, and sustainability. In addition, the social innovation case studies presented in this paper highlight that targeted open innovation is a key element for social BMI.