Managing Innovation, Design and Creativity

Chapter 31. Changes in the world and innovation

Since the publication of the first edition of this book the world of innovation has evolved. Processes and tools have been developed to help organisations to become more adept at innovation. So while some parts of the world's map of innovation have been coloured in, new lands have emerged and new paths around the world of innovation are being explored.

We will start this chapter with a brief look at the next items on the innovation agenda. Some of the developments that have moved from the fringes closer to the centre of attention are discontinuous innovation, open innovation and user-led innovation. We have already discussed issues around open and user-led innovation in Chapter 13. This chapter will provide an overview of thinking around discontinuous innovation. I will draw on the work of Clayton Christensen who has brought the topic to the forefront of managers' attention with his book Innovator's Dilemma (1997) and subsequently by Innovator's Solution (2003) and Seeing What's Next. A second source I am drawing on for the subject of discontinuous innovation is a project to understand better how companies currently address the issue of discontinuous innovation, which was supported by the Advanced Institute of Management (www.aimresearch.org). ^[115] We will actually see that open innovation and user-led innovation have an important role to play in preparing for discontinuous innovation.

I will close this chapter by taking a look at developments ...