Managing Innovation: Integrating Technological, Market and Organizational Change, 5th Edition

Chapter 2

Innovation as a Core Business Process

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2.1 Introduction

Chapter 1 set out a view of innovation as the core renewal process within an organization, refreshing what it offers the world and how it creates and delivers that offering. Figure 2.1 reproduces the model and we will use this in the remainder of the book. Innovation is a generic activity associated with survival and growth and at this level of abstraction we can see the underlying process as common to all firms. At its heart it involves:

• Searching – scanning the environment (internal and external) for, and processing relevant signals about, threats and opportunities for change.
• Selecting – deciding (on the basis of a strategic view of how the enterprise can best develop) which of these signals to respond to.
• Implementing – translating the potential in the trigger idea into something new and launching it in an internal or external market. Making this happen is not a single event but requires attention to acquiring the knowledge resources to enable the innovation, executing the project under conditions of uncertainty which require extensive problem-solving and launching the innovation into relevant internal ...