Comprehensive Intellectual Capital Management: Step-By-Step

Chapter 7. The Innovation Management Stage

Thomas Edison created the "innovation factory"^[202] in the 1890s, and so laid the foundation for the discipline of innovation management (IM) and the new product development (NPD) process. The NPD process organizations use today has the same stages and steps that Edison perfected over 100 years ago. One may wonder, therefore, if IM in the knowledge economy has changed in any way other than through the use of technological solutions that speed up the process and cut both testing time and complexity. Though the NPD process has remained substantially the same, the crux of IM has been revolutionized by the IC concept. Like knowledge becoming the main raw resource in everything produced today, innovation has become the main organizational process that adds, and hence extracts, value. This is true whether the innovative capacity of the organization is turned inward, in search of excellence and better ways of doing business, or turned outward to make new products.

Innovation management is the stage at which value created at the knowledge management (KM) stage is extracted by transforming knowledge into a product or a work process. Innovation in the knowledge economy is not a mere process for making new products, but is the main production process at a time when organizations innovate or perish. The need to manage innovation as the core production process has overbearing implications on business management as a whole. Under the IC concept, innovation ...