Leveraging Constraints for Innovation

INTRODUCTION

Jelena Spanjol

Professor and Head, Institute for Innovation Management, Munich School of Management, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Munich, GermanySebastian Gurtner

Professor of Health Care Management, Strategy & Innovation, Institute for Corporate Development, Bern University of Applied Sciences, Bern, Switzerland

I.1 Why Do We Need This Book?

Since the seminal work of the SAPPHO (Rothwell et al., 1974) and NewProd (Cooper, 1979) studies in the 1970s and 1980s, much has been written about how to support and enable innovation and what factors are critical to ensure innovation success. A simple search on Google Books for “innovation success factors” results in over 197,000 hits. Despite these many writings, conclusively benchmarking a reliable set of new product success factors has become more difficult over the past two decades, as the marketplace is increasingly dynamic and global, thus turning previously differentiating success factors into basic competitive norms. In this information age where globalized co-creation and data-rich environments are on our doorstep, simply meeting current needs of existing customers no longer ensures new product market success.

Innovation failure – the flip side of success factors and enablers – while of great interest to firms, has received far less attention. The Google Books “failure” search results in fewer than half the number of hits as the success search. Moreover, our understanding of innovation challenges lacks a coherent ...