innovation management by deborah dougherty

Professor Deborah Dougherty at Rutgers Business School produced a wonderfully concise overview video explaining the concept of innovation management.

What is “innovation management” you ask? Included with the video description is an elegantly succinct summary:

“Innovation entails integrating technologies and other knowledge into a whole product, a whole technology platform, a whole business, a whole company and a whole ecology of enterprises.”

“Innovation management focuses on the linkages and synergies among people, work units, knowledge systems, alliance partners, and inter-organizational associations that are necessary to create streams of new products and services. Innovation management is about creating and managing all these links. Tear down those silos.”

Many of the concepts illustrated in the video correspond nicely with the concepts I put forth in my article What’s the Value of Innovation Management?

For example, the diagram of how innovation in an organization needs to include not only Product Development but Business Model, Capability Development and Strategy Exploration neatly mirrors my expansion of IDEO’s “Viable-Feasible-Desirable” concept to include perpetual Customer, Research and Prototyping cycles.

I also snickered at the comment at 5:32: “But there were still problems…in some companies, even if the new product teams involve all departments and leverage capabilities, the business units would not adopt the new products…the business units are worried about short-term revenues and did not want to spend energy building new applications…there was a valley of death between the innovations and the businesses.”

That perfectly describes what happened to me with Luminous Patterns!

Adjacent to such business unit problems inherent in large companies, I believe that smaller companies experience a different challenge, and that is one of expectation management for new innovations, which I diagrammed using the classic “hype cycle”:

Anyway – this video consolidates a vast amount of content into a brief overview. Terrific!