InnovationEdge and Pure Insight Webinars

Building a Capability for Breakthrough Innovation

DATE: 15 MAY 2008 10:00 - 11:00 ET

location: your office

What You Will Learn

• The three distinctive competencies needed to build a sustainable portfolio of breakthrough opportunities.
• How to Identify, clarify, articulate and elaborate breakthrough opportunities.
• What Incubation requires.
• The appropriate metrics for innovation.
• The right processes for managing and evaluating projects that are highly uncertain and ambiguous in terms of potential outcomes.

About this webinar

Companies large and small are clamoring for innovation – breakthrough, discontinuous innovation. The trouble is, they don’t know how to make it happen. “We’ve atrophied,” a senior technical leader at GE’s global research center told us four years ago. “We’ve been so focused on responding to immediate needs and on taking cost out of our products that we’ve forgotten how to turn advanced technologies into breakthrough products and businesses.”

Most companies aren’t managed in ways that help breakthroughs flourish so they end up hoping the next breakthrough will come along with luck. Or that a breakthrough will just happen from an impassioned employee who breaks through the rules and red tape to get an idea noticed.  Innovation doesn’t have to be this haphazard.

Since we started researching this problem in 1995, we’re awed at the extent to which companies are investing in developing systems for breakthrough innovation. They are experimenting with building innovation functions, departments, disciplines. In short, they’re developing management systems for innovation that parallel the finely tuned management systems they’ve always had for operational excellence.

Professor O’Connor will discuss how companies seeking to compete on the basis of major, disruptive innovation can build sustainable competencies to do so. Rather than relying on strong willed project champions to break company rules in bringing breakthoughs to market, Prof. O’Connor and her research team have identified three distinctive competencies that firms must develop to ensure that breakthroughs do not happen by brute forces alone, but rather are the results of a management system designed for innovation that aligns with the well-honed management system of operational excellence that is predominant in most established companies today. The three distinct competencies, derived from examining twelve companies for four years, are: Discovery, Incubation and Acceleration. During this session we will describe these in some detail, how they work together, and how the elements of a management system play out for each of them.

In this session, O'Connor will:

• Describe what breakthrough innovation capability is.
• Detail the three distinctive competencies needed to build a sustainable portfolio of breakthrough opportunities.
• Clarify the elements of the management system that leaders must consider as they build innovation capabilities in the firm.
• Offer ways of diagnosing the innovation portfolio’s health.

By attending you will learn how to:

• Identify, clarify, articulate and elaborate breakthrough opportunities.
• Discriminate between Discovery, Incubation and Acceleration.
• Consider all elements of a management system in building an Innovation function, rather than just one or two, as has been typical in the past.

About the Speaker

Gina O’Connor, Ph.D. is Associate Professor of Marketing at the Lally School of Management and Technology, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, New York. She is a well known scholar in the area of innovation management within large established firms. She focuses particularly on technological innovation; on how firms link advanced technologies to market opportunities and use technological opportunities to create new markets. Under her direction, the second phase of the Radical Innovation research program helped define sustainable competencies and the elements of a management system to enable companies to develop breakthrough innovations repeatedly. She is well published, having won the Journal of Product Innovation Management’s Best Paper of the Year Award three times, (an honor she alone holds), as well as publishing articles in highly acclaimed professional and scholarly journals, including Organization Science and MIT’s Sloan Management Review.

Professor O’Connor believes, based on her years of research in the area, that innovation is an emerging business function in companies today, and works through her educational and consulting efforts to help companies understand how to develop new business creation expertise and management systems for innovation.