Citation
Knight, D. and Randall, R.M. (2005), "Editors' letter", Strategy & Leadership, Vol. 33 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/sl.2005.26133aaa.001
Publisher
:Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2005, Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Editors' letter
We’ve been on a reconnaissance over the past year to find articles with the latest thinking and actionable ideas in innovation management, a critical corporate survival issue. We enlisted a number of Strategy & Leadership contributing editors in the project – Robert J. Allio, Brian Leavy, and Robert Sutton played key roles by recruiting several talented authors and by interviewing a leading expert. We knew as we embarked on this journey that the field has evolved beyond product development and traditional R&D, now described as “sustaining” innovation. We knew it had moved to broader issues of strategy and new business model development, increasingly called “disruptive” innovation. We soon learned that much of the advice offered by innovation gurus over the past decade, and widely adopted as conventional wisdom, is contradicted by recent research. What surprised us was the divergence of views on what different innovation management experts now believe provides practitioners the best solutions for profitable growth through disruptive innovation. Some of the emerging views that we serve up in this special issue are:
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The paradox and the necessity of pursuing sustaining and disruptive innovation simultaneously require a new kind of talent called integral leadership.
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The usual tools of persuasion – reason, statistics, and bullet-points of logic – fail to cause the necessary changes in management culture to allow disruptive innovation to thrive. Leaders must guide companies through an emotional leap to embrace a future based upon disruptive innovation in technology and work practices.
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The search for viable disruptive innovation – new customer values, new markets, new business models – starts by systematically exploring a company’s strategic frontier.
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By bringing innovation in from the outside and commercializing it, companies change both their approach to R&D management and their culture.
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Strategic planning remains one of the best innovation tools. Use it to screen new opportunities based on relative profit pools, value advantages, leadership capabilities, and relation to existing business.
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Instead of betting your company’s future only on research on the cutting edge of science, also focus on recombining ideas, technologies, and practices from other industries.
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Identify and customize a suite of metrics to enable managers to more effectively assess and adjust innovation efforts.
Despite the variety of views and some possible bias from their own research and experience, we believe all the authors in this special issue provide you with interesting and useful insights and actionable ideas. So settle back to read, learn and enjoy – happy innovating!
Dan Knight and Robert M. RandallCo-editors, special issue on innovation management