Stages and Steps of Innovation

There are three main stages of innovation - idea creation, development and commercialisation. These can be seen as the following steps:

There are different models of innovation offered by several authors. Different models can also contribute toward our understanding of who is likely to introduce or exploit an innovation. These contributions can be summarized by four questions, which are at the core of the information collection and processing that underpins the introduction and exploitation of innovation – the how, who, what and when.

How: The first question is, how different is the new knowledge from an institution’s existing knowledge, and how different is the new product or service from existing ones? That is, how new is the new knowledge? Is the innovation incremental, architectural, or radical? How obsolete does the innovation render existing products or services? How much of the new knowledge is required? How tacit is it? How central is the innovation to the products or services that the institution produces?

Who: Radical to whom? That is, when we say that an innovation is incremental, architectural, or radical, the question is, to whom? This question can have three different contexts: inside the institution; along the institution’s innovation value-added chain of suppliers, customers, and complementary innovators; and in the global context within which the institution is operating.

What: What is it about some institutions that allow them to innovate better than their competitors? Why can’t other institutions acquire this what? It can be internal or external to the institution. Internally, is it the ability of an institution to perform certain activities? What activities? Is it the institution’s ability to recognize the potential of an innovation, or to build new capabilities quickly? Is it the type of people that the institution attracts – the best champions, sponsors, project managers, and gatekeepers? Is it the intellectual property that the institution has accumulated? Is it the institution’s strategies? Looking outside the institution, the question becomes: what is it about the institution’s local environment that makes local institutions more innovative?

When: When in the life of the innovation are we answering the how, who and what questions? The capabilities that allow an institution to perform well early in the life of an innovation may not be appropriate in the mature stage of the innovation. We will examine the management of innovation further in the Unit 4 ‘Management of Change and Innovation’ within this Module.