Innovation

WALTER VAN DYCK: Well, Philip and I have been around in the innovation landscape for quite a while now. And we were struck by the fact that most of books off of innovation, they deal with these very known cases like Apple, for example.

And we thought, well, there's a lot of small jewels around that nobody talks about, and for which, I'm sure, that practicing innovation managers can learn a lot. So that's why we gathered a number of practitioners and academics from the school and wrote up these cases, and tried to learn from them to see how innovation can be managed.

Innovation matters because it's essential as a support of competitive the strategy. So every CEO should know how to manage his or her innovation of his or her company. More specifically, we distinguish between sustained innovation and disruptive innovation. So sustained innovation means that you support innovation to thrive your present business. Whereas on the other hand, you also use innovation to get to different type of businesses.

In the book we deal, for example, in the first case for sustained innovation, we deal with Bic, which is a very known company. But it is very good in sustaining itself in a very competitive market. Another example in disruptive innovation, that we have a case where we explain how a small company active in the bedding industry, which is a very mature industry, through innovating together with people from NASA get to more differentiated products.

So that's the main reason why we think you should innovate why innovation matters. And the point is that you have to, in order to do this then, we think that you need to define your own what we call 'innovation style.'

To design or to create your own innovation style we think there's three aspects that you need to consider. The first aspect has to do with the number of different approaches that you want to use in steering innovation or in executing innovation in the company. You can imagine that for small companies, this set of approaches will be very reduced. It will predominantly be based on experimenting and learning from new markets. That's also what we described in one of the cases, like GreenPan.

GreenPan, which introduces a green pan in a very mature industry again, is a very small player. Again, big ones, like Tefal and others. So that's just one approach.

The older you get as a company, the more diverse will be the set of approaches. In cases like we described, like from Alcatel-Lucent or from Belgacom, for example, there you will see that they have a mix of approaches which is more geared towards on one hand, let's say, experimentation. But also on the other hand, more like in disciplined execution.

So next to these sets of approaches, second aspect that you need to consider is the innovation journey that you have to go on. The innovation journey means that anything you do is part of a journey, is part of a path that you are crossing, that you are moving on as a company. People sometimes think that innovation is all about just like a lamp that's lighten. Well, that's not really how it works.

It builds upon your competence that you have built up before. And of course, you have to differentiate on and on. And products and services that you invent, they build upon your previous successes and failures, basically. So its this journey aspect that you need to take into consideration. And it's quite an important one, I'd say.

A third aspect that you then have to look at whilst on the journey, is basically the choice of balance. So what set of approaches are you going to-- so being in one part of your journey, what sort of approaches are you going to use predominately?