CHAPTER 6 Search Strategies for Innovation
It’s clear that opportunities for innovation are not in short supply – and they arise from many different directions. The key challenge for innovation management is how to make sense of the potential input – and to do so with often limited resources. No organization can hope to cover all the bases, so there needs to be some underlying strategy to how the search process is undertaken. In this chapter, we’ll try and develop a simple framework based around five key questions to help contend with the search challenge.
One way to manage this challenge is to impose some dimensions on the search space to help us frame where and why we might search for innovation triggers. These might include the following:
- What? – the different kinds of opportunities being sought in terms of incremental or radical change
- When? – the different search needs at different stages of the innovation process
- Who? – the different players involved in the search process, and in particular, the growing engagement of more people inside and outside the organization
- Where? – from local search aiming to exploit existing knowledge through to radical and beyond into new frames
- How? – mechanisms for enabling search
Figure 6.1 illustrates this framework.
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