Targeting innovation and implications for capability development

Innovation is often described in terms of changes in what a firm offers the world (product/service innovation) and the ways it creates and delivers those offerings (process innovation). Arguably this definition is insufficient since it does not take into account two other areas where innovation is possible-market position and business models. Market position relates to the situation where an established product/service produced by an established process is introduced to a new context; here the innovation management challenge is concerned with issues like adoption behaviour and technology transfer. Business model innovation relates to the situation in which a reframing of the current product/service, process and market context results in seeing new challenges and opportunities and letting go of others.

Each of these poses challenges for the ways in which innovation is organised and managed—what we term innovation management capability. The paper explores some of these challenges and also looks at the additional issues raised by discontinuous innovation, moving beyond the steady state conditions of ‘doing what we do but better’ to a new set of conditions in which ‘doing different things in different ways’ becomes the norm.