Radical Innovation

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 managerial challenges large companies face in creating and sustaining radical innovation. 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.