Crafting Organizational Innovation Processes

We have just completed a new report from our project - Crafting Organizational Innovation Processes. Here is the abstract of the paper: Innovation is a crucial component of business strategy, but the process of innovation may seem difficult to manage. To plan organizational initiatives around innovation or to bolster innovation requires a firm grasp of the innovation process. Few organizations have transparently defined such a process. Based on the findings of an exploratory study in over 30 US and European companies that successfully foster innovation, this paper breaks the innovation process down into discrete stages: idea generation and mobilization, screening and advocacy, experimentation, commercialization, diffusion and implementation. For each stage, context, outputs and critical ingredients are discussed. There are several common tensions and concerns at each stage, which are enumerated; industry examples are also given. Finally, strategies for and indicators of organizational maturity around innovation are discussed for each stage. Mature organizations will use an outlined innovation process to create a common framework for discussion and initiatives around the innovation process, and to establish metrics and goals for each stage of the innovation process.

The authors of the paper are: Kevin C. Desouza (The Information School, University of Washington), Caroline Dombrowski (The Information School, University of Washington), Yukika Awazu (McCallum Graduate School of Business, Bentley College), Peter Baloh (Faculty of Economics, University of Ljubljana), Sridhar Papagari (Dept. of Information & Decision Sciences, University of Illinois at Chicago), Jeffrey Y. Kim (The Information School, University of Washington), and Sanjeev Jha (Dept. of Information & Decision Sciences, University of Illinois at Chicago).

All sponsors of our research project will receive a copy of the paper on October 11, 2006.