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Sustaining breakthrough innovation.

Article Excerpt
More than 100 practitioners of innovation assembled in Cambridge, Massachusetts in November 2008 to discuss the importance of innovation as a management discipline and share leading-edge practices critical to its future (1). In this rich environment, I had the opportunity to deliver a keynote address, in which I positioned innovation as an emerging business function, just as marketing emerged as such in the mid-1950s.

Innovation as a distinct and separate management discipline is moving from an academic concept into real-world practice at major corporations. The focus of our research program at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute has been to understand how firms can build a sustainable breakthrough innovation (BI) capability, knowing that back in 2001 the average life expectancy of these initiatives was only about four years. I am pleased to report that the life expectancy is increasing as companies embark upon a more systematic approach to innovation, become more strategic about it and learn how to orchestrate their innovation capacity.

Research Insights

Our insights are based on the cumulative learning of 28 companies directly participating in this research and over 100 companies involved in validating the research and tools through the Industrial Research Institute (IRI). We learned, first, that breakthrough innovation can be characterized by high uncertainty, which is no surprise. But our initial insights led us to identify four distinct categories of uncertainty (market, technical, resource, and organizational uncertainty), which fuel a host of management challenges. In addition to technical and market issues that project teams typically face, resource (accessing talent, partners and money) and organization (establishing and maintaining organizational legitimacy) uncertainties must also be managed. In fact, the latter two are the ones most likely to impede project success.

Along with the importance of reducing uncertainty across multiple dimensions, the management challenges we observed include: 1) capturing breakthroughs (clarifying and articulating breakthrough concepts); 2) managing projects that experience the chaos of multidimensional uncertainty and ambiguity; 3) learning about markets that do not yet exist; 4) developing new business models; 5) acquiring resources...

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