Are the dynamics of innovation changing?

Ran across an intriguing article in Sunday’s New York Times. The author, Steve Lohr, raised the question of whether current trends may create a shift in advantage in innovation– from entrepreneurial companies to large ones. The argument is thatmany of today’s biggestproblems are in complex fields such as energy and the environment — and that solutions will need to be multidisciplinary rather than the work of entrepreneurial inventors. “The pendulum of thinking on innovation does seem to be swinging toward the big guys,” Lohr wrote.

The article brought to mind for mean interview I conducted with Harvard Business School’s Clayton M. Christensen last fall. An edited version of the interview with Clay Christensen appeared in the Spring 2009 issue of MIT Sloan Management Review – but one point that didn’t make it into the published version (due to space constraints) was a brief observation Christensen made aboutestablished companies and disruptive innovation.Christensen noted that he had become”a lotmore optmistic” in the last five years about leading companies’ ability to successfully innovate disruptively, if the management team understands the principles of disruptive innovation.

Still, though, there’s certainly research suggesting that large companies often have difficulty successfully managingcorporate venturing programsdesigned tofoster innovative new businesses.As authors Rita Gunther McGrath, Thomas Keil and Taina Tukiainen observed in“Extracting Value From Corporate Venturing,”a 2006 article in MIT Sloan Management Review:

Executives wax and wane in their enthusiasm for launching new ventures outside an organization’s core business. In their more enthusiastic moments, leaders often see corporate venturing initiatives as sources of organic growth and vitally important engines of renewal. However, in their more disenchanted periods executives may see new ventures as high-risk, foolhardy distractions from effectively running the core business. What’s more, such pessimism isn’t wrong. Corporate ventures are risky and they usually do not produce hoped-for results.

What do you think? Are the dynamics of innovation changing in ways that favor larger companies? And are large companies getting significantly better at managing innovation — or not?

Source: Sloane Review

Comments

[Bob Lieberman]

I don't think there is any fundamental shift in the way innovation occurs. Truly disruptive innovation is a system adapting to a successful and particularly challenging irritant. The irritant irritates, the system adapts. If the irritation is fundamental then so will be the adaptation. By the time we observe the unfolding change, it can be difficult to distinguish one from the other. One example from the Times article illustrates this – the innovation of electronic medical records. Moving to electronic records is described as beyond the capacity of the garage inventor, requiring complex involvement from various disciplines and many large institutions. But electronic medical records may not actually be an innovation. It's more likely that the real innovation will turn up only after we've had electronic records for a while, when someone is able to see for the first time what doors have been opened.

[external hard drives]

Creativity is the ability to think differently, to get outside of the box that constrains solutions. Creativity gives leaders the ability to see things that others have not seen and thus lead followers in new directions.