Managing innovation beyond the steady state

Research on the innovation process and its effective management has consistently highlighted a set of themes constituting ‘good practice’. The limitation of such ‘good practice’ is that it relates to what might be termed ‘steady state’ innovation - essentially innovative activity in product and process terms which is about ‘doing what we do, but better’. The prescription works well under these conditions of (relative) stability in terms of products and markets but is not a good guide when elements of discontinuity come into the equation. Discontinuity arises from shifts along technological, market, political and other frontiers and requires new or at least significantly adapted approaches to their effective management. This paper explores relevant routines which organisations can implement to enable discontinuous innovation.

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