Innovation is a key driver of firm competitive advantage and profitability of large corporations and other organisations. Yet the journey of innovative ideas from inception to implementation is often not straightforward. Our research focuses on how organisations make decisions during periods of uncertainty, how they manage the idea creation and evaluation process, and how they collaborate with other players through open innovation and other innovation approaches.
Sub-themes
Innovation is an intrinsically uncertain affair. Our research pays specific attention to leader-follower dynamics and the challenges firms face when they enter completely uncharted territory in the form of new product markets or new industries.
Novel ideas for new products, services or technologies in large corporations are often received with scepticism initially. They may even be discarded by risk-averse senior managers before these ideas have had a chance to develop. In this research theme, we investigate how organisations manage idea generation, selection and evaluation processes.
The days of firms exclusively developing their innovations in-house have long gone. Our research looks into the strategic implications of open innovation and innovation ecosystems for value capture, and for the challenges these approaches to innovation raise for organisations and their employees.
IB Knowledge
R&D: when it does (and doesn’t) pay to invest
NHS in crisis: what Scotland can teach England
Don’t cramp my style! Why people are more creative on their own time
Selected academic output
- Whom should a leader imitate? Using rivalry-based imitation to manage strategic risk in changing environments by Dmitry Sharapov and Jan‐Michael Ross
- Manoeuvring in poor visibility: how firms play the ecosystem game when uncertainty is high by Brice Dattée, Oliver Alexy and Erkko Autio
- The biases that keep good R&D projects from getting funded by Paola Criscuolo, Linus Dahlander, Thorsten Grohsjean, Ammon Salter
- Multilevel organizational adaptation: Scale invariance in the Scottish healthcare system by Brice Dattée and James Barlow