Manage Your Company’s Innovation Interdependencies

Abstract

In face of growing competitive pressures, many companies broaden their innovation activities beyond product development to address other types of innovation, such as new services, processes, and business models, which traditionally were often neglected. There are important interfaces among these innovation types, but their interplay is often ignored. The¯ndings of 45 exploratory interviews underscore the managerial relevance of innovation interdependencies. A framework with the di®erent innovation types is developed, and a case example of car-sharing is described. Moreover, the performance implications and implementation steps for actively managing innovation interdependencies are described. Without considering the interplay of multiple innovation types, the potential bene¯ts of a¯rm's innovation activities will not fully materialize. Consequently, many¯rms' di±culties in pro¯ting from innovation do not derive from an inappropriate management of product innovation. Instead, many of these di±culties can be traced back to an insu±cient attention to innovation interdependencies.

Data management efficiency: major opportunities for shared value innovation

“…In sum, executives and managers can pursue each type of innovation to achieve the particular benefits, and their firms may enjoy additional benefits from the complementarity of these different types of innovation. Drawing on established process segmentations in the literature (Lichtenthaler, 2016a;Cooper et al, 1999;Porter and Kramer, 2011), an innovation-based perspective therefore leads to the following five process stages, which may guide companies in implementing shared value innovations with regard to data management efficiency (Figure 2).…”

“…Third, executives have to take into account the need for potential second-order innovations in terms of strategic renewal and strategic realignment in the transformation dimension (Zahra et al, 2006;Exposito and Sanchis-Llopis, 2018). Fourth, potential positive and negative interdependencies among different first-order and second-order innovations deserve particular attention and need to be assessed thoroughly (Lichtenthaler, 2016a;Stieglitz and Heine, 2007). Fifth, the final implementation stage refers to executing the interdependent innovations, and it also involves regularly checking the need for potential revisions and alterations (Pfitzer et al, 2013;Huston and Sakkab, 2007).…”