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The Exceptional Manager

Chapter 5: Innovating Beyond the Steady State

Successful Radical/Discontinuous Innovation

A range of issues has been investigated further when it comes to the question of how organisations might successfully manage discontinuous change. In particular the impact and development of new firm networks (see Julian Birkinshaw, John Bessant, and Rick Delbridge, 'Finding, Forming, and Performing: Creating Networks for Discontinuous Innovation', Californian Management Review, 49/3 (Spring 2007), pp. 67-84).

How do they do it? How do we define success/radical? What is the nature and role of anticipation? How significant is the increase in open innovation? It is clear that in many sectors the nature of change is that it is driven by forces that are exogenous to the organization. It is of course likely that this was always, at least partly, the case, so perhaps the difference is as much a broader recognition of the fact and a wider response focussing on mechanisms such as open and collaborative innovation.

This links back to the challenge we have also considered in the AIM SST research (see Comments on Chapter 1), but it is also worth recalling that the successful firms that we identified were a very small group from the overall population, and hence it is inevitable that the challenge is a difficult one.

It is noteworthy that some of the more recent research has suggested there is a significant dilemma in the appropriate approach that might be used to open up mental frameworks in on group basis (see Hodgkinson, AIM). In general, for instance in strategy workshops (Johnson et al., AIM) it appears the very conditions and contexts in which this can be done more effectively are also those which are much more likely to create a distance between the specific activity undertaken and the actions that are then enacted in the specific corporate context. To put this in more anthropological terms the successful ritualization also creates distance from the profane or the real(see Johnson et al., AIM).