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Bridging the Innovation Gap

Daniel Huber, Heiner Kaufmann, Martin Steinmann

188 Pages
2017-05-17

Bridging the Innovation Gap

Blueprint for the Innovative Enterprise

Springer

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"Bridging the Innovation Gap" - Summary

"Bridging the Innovation Gap" offers a comprehensive look into the world of innovation management, providing fresh insights and practical solutions for enterprises. The authors, Daniel Huber, Heiner Kaufmann, and Martin Steinmann, explore the common challenges businesses face in fostering innovation and present a proven system to overcome these hurdles. The book delves into the concept of the "innovation gap" and introduces a new element called "Exploration" to enhance the innovation process. With a focus on leadership and building robust innovation models, this book is a must-read for anyone looking to boost their organization's innovative capabilities and stay ahead in a competitive market.

Key Ideas

1

The Innovation Gap

The book identifies a critical missing element in current innovation theories, termed the "innovation gap." This gap represents the disconnect between an organization's potential to innovate and its actual innovative output. By understanding and addressing this gap, businesses can significantly enhance their ability to innovate and implement new ideas effectively.

2

Exploration in Innovation

A new and vital component introduced in the book is "Exploration." This concept emphasizes the importance of exploring new ideas, technologies, and processes as a fundamental part of the innovation process. By incorporating exploration, enterprises can discover untapped opportunities and stay ahead of industry trends, ensuring long-term success and sustainability.

3

Leadership and Innovation Models

The authors highlight the crucial role of leadership in fostering a culture of innovation. Effective leaders can inspire and motivate their teams to think creatively and take calculated risks. Additionally, the book provides a blueprint for building strong innovation models that integrate best practices and state-of-the-art knowledge, significantly increasing the chances of successful innovation within an organization.

FAQ's

The authors of "Bridging the Innovation Gap" are Daniel Huber, Heiner Kaufmann, and Martin Steinmann. They bring their expertise in innovation management to provide practical solutions for businesses.

The "innovation gap" refers to the disconnect between an organization's potential to innovate and its actual innovative output. By understanding and addressing this gap, businesses can enhance their ability to innovate and implement new ideas effectively.

"Exploration" is a new component introduced in "Bridging the Innovation Gap" that emphasizes the importance of exploring new ideas, technologies, and processes. This approach helps enterprises discover untapped opportunities and stay ahead of industry trends, ensuring long-term success and sustainability.

๐Ÿ’ก Full 15min Summary

The failure of systematic innovation in businesses is often due to an overlooked 'innovation gap' and cultural conflicts between operational and exploratory units.
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Innovation is crucial for the success of any business. However, it's often observed that the outcomes of systematic innovation efforts within companies are minimal. This is because innovation is heavily reliant on individual people rather than established processes. This indicates that there are still key aspects of innovation that are not fully understood.

The main question here is how to innovate systematically. To find an answer, we need to first understand why innovation efforts typically fail. The idea is that if we can pinpoint the reasons for failure, we can also identify the prerequisites for success.

The traditional model of innovation, known as the innovation funnel, consists of four stages: generating ideas, evaluating and selecting these ideas, developing them, and finally introducing them to the market. However, an analysis of this model reveals two stages where projects are often cancelled: 1) after the ideas have been selected for development, and 2) after they have been introduced to the market. The first stage, referred to as the "innovation gap", is not well-known because project cancellations at this stage are not visible externally. While the second stage is well-documented in literature, the innovation gap is not.

The innovation gap occurs between the early research stages (generating ideas and evaluating/selecting them) and the implementation stages (developing the ideas and introducing them to the market). This gap is a result of fundamental communication difficulties between the innovative units (explorers) who have an NT-dominated culture, and the rest of the company that has an SJ-dominated culture. SJs are ideal for managing operations, while NTs are best suited for exploring new fields. Both cultures are necessary, but they often clash. Misunderstandings at their interface systematically lead to innovation failures.

If this situation is not addressed, the stronger SJ culture will dominate, causing the NTs to leave. This reduces the company's innovation capability, making it dependent on a few key individuals who can bridge the two cultures. This scenario aligns with the typical innovation situation in most companies. Therefore, it can be concluded that the conventional innovation process is incomplete, which explains the failure of systematic innovation. The innovation gap between the early research stages and the implementation stages is an issue that has not been investigated before.

Moreover, well-managed companies usually hire SJs for operations and NTs for exploration. However, having two corporate cultures contradicts management principles. The resulting cultural conflict leads to SJ domination, which in turn reduces the company's innovation capability. Therefore, conventional management practices can actually hinder innovation.

In conclusion, innovation is not fully understood, there is an unknown innovation gap between the early research stages and the implementation stages due to cultural conflicts, and conventional management practices can prevent innovation. To enhance innovation, both the innovation gap and the cultural conflicts need to be addressed.

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