Strategic Innovation

Strategic Innovation offers a flexible, customizable template that managers, executives, and business leaders can use to introduce an effective innovation strategy throughout their organization. The authors, Nancy Tennant Snyder and Deborah L. Duarte, provide the tools needed to craft a workable strategy for embedding innovation as a core competency across an enterprise. Instead of innovation for innovation's sake, the authors offer a proven business-focused way to change a culture from point-in-time innovations from a few to a continuous pipeline of innovations from everywhere and everyone. Based on the real-life example of Whirlpool a solid company with a significant track record and global reach—Strategic Innovation shows how the world's largest appliance company put innovation in place as a core competency. During this process, Whirlpool transformed itself from a quality producer of appliances to a customer-focused company that strategically embeds innovation throughout the organization. Filled with challenges and struggles, and ultimately successful results, the Whirlpool story can help any organization develop a successful innovation strategy. Written as a practical guide, the book contains in each chapter a variety of hands-on resources including checklists and worksheets. Strategic Innovation offers the tools, ideas, and approaches needed for transforming an organization to a company where anyone and everyone can contribute to the organization's prosperity—through innovation.

This helpful resource contains tools and tricks to help companies excel in dynamic markets and provide groundbreaking products and services. The authors refer to this as “innovation” rather than “strategic planning,” but the truth is somewhere in-between: through a proven five-phase discovery process --for staging, aligning, exploring, creating, and mapping--strategic innovation will become a company-wide competency. In The Power of Strategy Innovation, you’ll learn how to: apply innovative thinking to your company’s business model to bridge the gap between strategy and product development; how to remain flexible, future-oriented, and responsive to market changes and your clients’ changing needs; and how to create a perpetual flow of viable new business opportunities. Informative interviews with corporate leaders dispersed throughout the book provide further insight into different industries and the ways they have committed to taking a more innovative approach. Through these shared methodologies, The Power of Strategy Innovation will forever transform the way you do business--and help you rise to become a leader in your industry.

In today’s fast-changing business environment, those firms that want to remain competitive must also be innovative. Innovation is not simply about developing new technologies into new products or services, but in many cases, finding new models for doing business in the face of change. It often entails changing the rules of the game. Strategic Innovation demonstrates to students how to create and appropriate value using new game strategies to gain competitive advantage. The book begins with a summary of the major strategic frameworks and showing the origins of strategic innovation. Next, Afuah gives a thorough examination of contemporary strategy from an innovation standpoint, including: how to develop strategy in the face of change a detailed framework for assessing the profitability potential of a strategy or product consideration of how both for-profit and non-profit organizations can benefit from new game strategies. With a wealth of quantitative examples of successful strategies, as well as descriptive cases, Strategic Innovation will complement courses in strategy, and technology and innovation.

This edited book focuses on strategic aspects of innovation in the context of resilience during and after a crisis. It investigates the strategies that firms utilize in order to cope with change especially in the competitive global marketplace. The book contends that, by design, entrepreneurship is strategic and innovative in every decision and action of a business. The goal of this book is to focus on the innovation and resilience behind these strategies in order to understand the business motivations. In particular, it focuses on the uncertainties initiated by the COVID-19 pandemic and highlights the growing research and practice experiences of resilient entrepreneurial businesses and innovations that continued to be stable and successful. The book thus extends current research on strategic entrepreneurship by integrating it with the field of resilience. This will help to bridge the gap between practice and theory with regard to strategic entrepreneurship. Furthermore, it enables an effective advancement of strategic entrepreneurship research in light of the COVID-19 pandemic.

A comprehensive playbook for applied design thinking in business and management, complete with concepts and toolkits As many companies have lost confidence in the traditional ways of running a business, design thinking has entered the mix. Design Thinking for Strategic Innovation presents a framework for design thinking that is relevant to business management, marketing, and design strategies and also provides a toolkit to apply concepts for immediate use in everyday work. It explains how design thinking can bring about creative solutions to solve complex business problems. Organized into five sections, this book provides an introduction to the values and applications of design thinking, explains design thinking approaches for eight key challenges that most businesses face, and offers an application framework for these business challenges through exercises, activities, and resources. An essential guide for any business seeking to use design thinking as a problem-solving tool as well as a business method to transform companies and cultures The framework is based on work developed by the author for an executive program in Design Thinking taught in Harvard Graduate School of Design Author Idris Mootee is a management guru and a leading expert on applied design thinking Revolutionize your approach to solving your business's greatest challenges through the power of Design Thinking for Strategic Innovation.

This new book explores how firms achieve competitive advantage in a disruptive, digital and globalized business landscape. An integrative framework, ‘The Four Rs of Competitive Success’, is introduced, which covers the four core pillars of global strategy: resources and capabilities, technology and innovation (recombination), internationalization and international markets (reach), and physical and virtual location (roots). It then explains how competitive advantage is achieved through an interaction of these four drivers against the backdrop of a globalized and digitized world. It is uniquely practical in its approach, combining theoretical understanding with international case studies and real-life examples throughout each chapter, including Apple, IKEA and Microsoft. Unlocking Strategic Innovation is concise, applied reading for postgraduate students studying international business, corporate strategy, innovation and digital strategy, as well as academics in the field. It will also be important reading for practitioners looking to gain further understanding of how firms compete and flourish in a global and technology-driven environment.

This book extends our understanding of how different cross- functional business and management disciplines, such as innovation and entrepreneurship, strategic management, marketing and HRM, individually and collectively underpin innovation in business management. Business Models for Strategic Innovation develops insights from cross-disciplinary business knowledge streams and their cutting edge discipline-specific practical implications to create a cross- functional business innovation management model. Novel cross- disciplinary knowledge plays an imperative role in business innovation and we know that innovative management processes have significant implications for effective cross- functional management. In this context, each chapter of the book presents fresh insights on diverse business knowledge- streams as well as their applied implications on cross- functional business innovation management. Finally, centred on these cross- disciplinary business theories and their cutting edge implications, the last chapter of this book proposes a model of strategic cross- functional business innovation management process. This academically rigorous work uses innovative theoretical propositions and state- of- the- art empirical analysis in order to enable cross- functional management teams to support organisation- wide business innovation processes.

Innovation is a vital process for any business to remain competitive in this age. This progress must be coherently and optimally managed, allowing for successful improvement and future growth. The Handbook of Research on Strategic Innovation Management for Improved Competitive Advantage provides emerging research on the use of information and knowledge to promote development in various business agencies. While covering topics such as design thinking, financial analysis, and policy planning, this publication explores the wide and complex relationships that constitute strategic innovation management principals and processes. This publication is an important resource for students, professors, researchers, managers, and entrepreneurs seeking current research on the methods and tools regarding information and knowledge management for business advancement.