Radical Innovation: How Mature Companies Can Outsmart Upstarts

by Richard Leifer, Christopher M. McDermott, Gina Colarelli O'Connor

How many big businesses have pioneered the technologies and business models that now dominate e-commerce, personal computing, biotechnology, and wireless telecommunication? The answer: hardly any. The problem is not that executives fail to recognize the need to infuse their organizations with the kind of model-busting innovative capabilities of agile startups. It's a lack of understanding of what to do and how to do it. But now, this groundbreaking book reveals the patterns through which game-changing innovation occurs in large, established companies, and identifies the new managerial competencies firms need to make radical innovation happen. The authors define a radical innovation project as one that delivers a product, process, or service with either unprecedented performance features, or with familiar features that will enable market transformation through significant performance improvements or cost reductions. These projects are nurtured within the established organization, not skunkworks. They are not concerned with exploiting current lines of business, but with exploring entirely new ones. Based on evidence from a five-year, real time study of twelve radical innovation projects within ten major corporations—including General Electric, IBM, Nortel Networks, DuPont, and Texas Instruments—this book addresses seven managerial challenges large companies face in creating and sustaining radical innovation: dealing with radical ideas in the 'fuzzy front end'; developing new models for project management; learning about unfamiliar markets; working through uncertainty in the business model; bridging resource and competency gaps; managing the transition from radical project to operating status; and, engaging individual initiative. The authors, experts in a variety of areas such as entrepreneurship, R&D management, product design, marketing, organizational behavior, and operations and project management, distill a comprehensive, interdisciplinary approach to mastering each of these challenges, from the conceptualization of viable ideas to the commercialization of radical innovations. Designed to push the envelope of thinking about the most significant challenge facing large companies today, this important book offers a revolutionary new paradigm for long-term corporate success.

Genres: Business

261 pages, Hardcover

First published January 15, 2000

Reviews

[Prasanna · Rating 5 out of 5]

I got this book at a sale three years ago at Borders - which was ironically closing because it could not innovate fast enough against online firms like Amazon. At the same time, I was starting to work at an Innovation lab at ESPN focused somewhere between radical and incremental innovation. I would occassionally attempt to read it and then shelve it after I'd find it not quite relevant to the kind of technologies that are in technology's critical path -- the way I see it (services, distributed systems, robots, etc). In the intervening time, I have gained exposure to various corporate intricacies beyond just "making it work."

This book talks about the qualitative aspects of taking a radical innovation and navigating the routes in corporation. In particular, this is a distillation of a case study done sometime in 90s of many large companies like IBM, Nortel and the various approaches they took to managing and channeling radical innovation. Whether it's software, hardware or service -- identifying and building product is always a challenge. There are many stakeholders in a large company to pivot quickly into new markets or approaches -- especially when the benefits aren't immediately apparent.

I recommend reading this -- going through the notes and indexes regardless of where you work and your role.

[Steen Sørensen]

Exelent book on the subject, only down side is maturity model is has only 2 levels, not mature and mature, thats a little easy...

[Rui Song · Rating 5 out of 5]

The most important book on my research, which inspired me most.