Successful innovations from an established company

Abstract

Purpose

The article recognizes the problems of successful innovation in big, “established” companies. However, these problems can be overcome; indeed, some companies are quite successful despite having been around for decades in several different businesses.

Design/methodology/approach

Two case companies are studied in three stages of a general model of innovation, where innovation consists of an ideation/discovery phase, an engineering/solution phase and a testing/launch phase. Some earlier research is quoted to support the statements.

Findings

In the ideation/discovery phase, the most important thing is novel ideas, which create novel, non‐established minds. In the engineering phase, surviving the turf wars of an established company require a “godfather” who can ensure the resources. In testing/launch phases, the support of real‐life users is especially important for both working solutions and understanding of the use environment.

Research limitations/implications

In our general understanding, all case studies attempt to show identifiable patterns that may or may not be relevant for the situation of the individual companies of the readers. The amount of detail allowed by the space limitations may also make it difficult to benchmark the practices of the case companies. However, we try to explain the mechanisms that make established companies non‐innovative and possible solutions to them as well as possible in this limited space and just two case studies.

Originality/value

The value of article lies in understanding that the problems of established companies to succeed in innovation are different in different stages of the process, e.g. unestablished ideators do not have sufficient power in the organization to see their ideas through the engineering and testing phases, while the established people will not typically search for such radical new ideas as the “young of mind” do.

Citation

Kekäle, T. and Kola‐Nyström, S. (2007), "Successful innovations from an established company", Business Strategy Series, Vol. 8 No. 2, pp. 109-115. https://doi.org/10.1108/17515630710685168