Making Innovation Work: How to Manage It, Measure It, and Profit from It

Chapter 3. Choosing Your Destiny: How to Design a Winning Innovation Strategy

Choosing the Right Strategy

	“Innovation is a survival issue.”
	--3M[1]

One of the first rules of innovation is that you must clearly decide how your organization is going to play the innovation game. This is senior management's responsibility. There is no menu of generic strategies from which to choose. Each company's management team has to craft its own innovation strategy, adapt to changing conditions, and choose the right time to make key moves.

The innovation strategy must support the business strategy. The amount and type of innovation (radical, semi-radical, and incremental) will vary depending on the strategy and the competitive environment. Like anything important, ...