In this seminal article, innovation experts Clayton Christensen, Stephen P. Kaufman, and Willy C. Shih explore the key reasons why companies struggle to innovate. The authors uncover common mistakes companies make—from focusing on the wrong customers to choosing the wrong products to develop—that can derail innovation efforts, and offer a better way forward for management teams who want to avoid these obstacles and get innovation right. Since 1922, Harvard Business Review has been a leading source of breakthrough ideas in management practice. The Harvard Business Review Classics series now offers you the opportunity to make these seminal pieces a part of your permanent management library. Each highly readable volume contains a groundbreaking idea that continues to shape best practices and inspire countless managers around the world.

Critics often decry an earnings-focused short-term orientation of management that eschews spending on risky, long term projects such as innovation in order to boost a firm's stock price. The critics' assume that stock markets respond to announcements of earnings that report immediate earnings and not of innovation that have a long-term payoff. Contrary to this position, the authors argue that the market's true appreciation of innovation can be estimated by assessing the total market returns to the entire innovation project The authors demonstrate this approach via the Fama-French 3 Factor Model (including Carhart's Momentum Factor) on 5481 announcements from 69 firms in 5 markets and 19 technologies, during the period 1977-2006.The authors find that total market returns to an innovation project are $643 million, more than 13 times the $49 million due to an average innovation event. Returns to negative events are higher in absolute value than those to positive events. Returns to development activities are higher than returns to either the setup or market activities. Returns are higher for smaller firms than larger firms. Returns to the announcing firm are substantially greater than those to competitors across all stages. The authors discuss the implications of the results.

The hands-on guide for fostering relentless innovation within your company Gerard Tellis, a noted expert on innovation, advertising, and global markets, makes the compelling case that the culture of a firm is the crucial driver of an organization's innovativeness. In this groundbreaking book he describes the three traits and three practices necessary to create a culture of relentless innovation. Organizations must be willing to cannibalize successful products, embrace risk, and focus on the future. Organizations build these traits by providing incentives for enterprise, empowering product champions, and encouraging internal markets. Spelling out the critical role of culture, the author provides illustrative examples of organizations with winning cultures and explores the theory and evidence for each of the six components of culture. The book concludes with a discussion of why culture is superior to alternate theories for fostering innovation. Offers a groundbreaking take on innovation that is driven by a company's culture Shows what it takes to create a culture of innovation within any organization Based on a study of 770 companies across 15 countries, the origin of 90 radical innovations spanning over 100 years, and the evolution of 66 markets spanning over a 100 years Provides numerous mini cases to illustrate the workings of culture Written by Gerard Tellis director of the Center for Global Innovation This must-have resource clearly shows the role of culture in driving relentless innovation and how to foster it within any organization.

Innovation is not easy. Understanding the liability of newness but the potential for greatness is the central theme of this work. Innovation Renaissance explores and debunks the myths that have arisen from the proliferation of misleading and often confusing popular press treatments of creativity and innovation. Examples include the notion that successful entrepreneurs are winners because they are innovative—whereas creativity and business start-up acumen are not the same, and are rarely paired—or the idea of disruptive technology, which has now become the buzzword equivalent to radical new technology products or services, despite the fact that new technologies tend to offer simple, limited-capability products or services to satisfy overlooked customer demand. The popularity of open innovation has spawned assumptions, like the idea that crowdsourcing will increase the number of truly new ideas—but in fact the more novel these ideas, the less likely they are to be adopted by incumbent firms because they are less familiar. Starting by defining innovation and the theories that have arisen surrounding it, Ettlie considers individual creativity and innovativeness, radical innovation, new products, new services, process innovation, and information technology. There is special emphasis on neglected topics such as the dark side of the innovation process—the unintended consequences of new ventures. Finally, the last chapter of the book summarizes a prescriptive model of the innovation process and attempts to answer the question: what causes innovation? Three major constructs are explored: leadership, enhancing capabilities and integration. This informative and unique text is designed as a resource for postgraduate students, academics, and professionals deeply committed to understanding and working through the innovation process. The book includes an introduction to the subject before moving on to an in-depth study of emerging evidence and topics in the field.

In contemporary economics only one thing is constant – constant change [Gunday et al., 2011]. The notion of change relates directly to innovation. The very nature of innovation constitutes combining existing factors in a new, changed way. Since the early stage of the scientific investigation of innovation research has focused mainly on the solutions actually implemented [Schumpeter 1939]. Yet it is only through implementation that the benefits of innovation may materialise. The task is not simple. The process of obtaining the gains is complex as innovation may pass through different stages. Thus for almost half-century the scientific community has considered innovation to be a complex process and not just a simple occurrence [Myers and Marquis 1969]. Innovation pushes progress forward. Thus previous scientific investigation limited the concept of innovation to implementations which generate positive effects [Nelson and Winter 1982]. The above scientific considerations still hold today [Moss Kanter 2006]. Innovation is of crucial importance for tourism companies, which cover accommodation for visitors, food and beverage serving activities, passenger transportation, travel agencies and other reservation activities, cultural activities, sports and recreational activities and retail trade of country-specific tourism characteristic goods [UNWTO 2010]. It provides them with competitive advantage and hence the firms with market power gain more from innovation [Tirole 1995]. A firm’s innovation interacts with the environment. It delivers diverse benefits to the consumers in the form of new products and lower prices which in turn impact positively on the company [Shiller 2006]. In the context of tourism the ongoing scientific discussion on innovation seems not to have achieved any definite conclusions yet. The implementation of innovation in tourism enterprises leads to the achievement of diverse ends. From this point of view the measurement of the effects of innovation is of vital importance. There are a number of financial measures covering substantially different fields. The most comprehensive amongst them is a company’s value. It covers all the aspects of a company’s activity [Bodie and Merton 2000]. However due to its importance and complexity numerous approaches to company value were created. The basic distinction covers book and market value based approaches. The proponents of book value assume that the balance sheet yields a reliable estimate of the value of assets and equities. However numerous shortcomings emerge: the static character, dealing with historical figures, failing to include intangibles and treating all classes of accounts as having equal importance [Nunes 2003]. The market value based approach stands for the price that assets would fetch in the marketplace [Fabrozi and Drake 2009]. The main objective of the research is to measure the short- and long-term impact of innovation announcements on the market value of equity of tourism enterprises.

This volume focuses on substantive issues in innovation, marketing strategy, and the nexus of innovation and marketing strategy.

Illustrates with examples from both old and new industries to explain how large, successful companies can lose their markets almost overnight to new, often small competitors armed with faster-developing technologies and better products.

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.

Are you spending too much on R&D? Too little? Is your innovation program successful? And how do you measure that success? Your company is spending millions on R&D every year, but despite your best efforts, that R&D isn’t driving growth. If you’re like 95% of firms, you aren’t investing the right amount, and the productivity of your R&D has fallen dramatically over the past several years. That’s because there hasn’t been a universal, uniform, and reliable measure of R&D—until now. First introduced in Anne Marie Knott’s influential Harvard Business Review article, RQTM (Research Quotient) is a revolutionary new tool that measures a company’s R&D capability—its ability to convert investment in R&D into products and services people want to buy or to reduce the cost of producing these. RQ not only tells companies how “smart” they are, it provides a guide for how much they should invest in R&D to ensure that investment will increase revenues, profits, and market value. Armed with insights from her experience as an R&D project manager, 20 years of academic research, and two National Science Foundation grants, Knott devised RQ and used the measure to test common innovation prescriptions across the full spectrum of U.S. companies engaged in R&D. The results are nothing short of game-changing. In this essential guide, you will learn: • how to use RQ to determine which R&D investments are most likely to drive growth—using the hard data you already have to better utilize the innovation tools you’re already using • the 7 misconceptions about innovation trends—and how to avoid the ones that don’t work • how investors can achieve 9x returns in the market and help companies in the process • why corporate—and GDP—growth has stalled and how to restore it without R&D tax credits This book promises to do for innovation and R&D what TQM did for manufacturing and what Sabremetrics did for baseball. It’ll show you How Innovation Really Works—with measurable results you can count on.

Market-based assets, such as brands or customer relationships, can be thought of as intangibles that arise through the commingling of the firm with its environment. As such, they are constructs that bridge the conceptual gap between managerial actions and firms’ financial performance. This dissertation conducts three studies that advance the understanding of investments in market-based assets conceptually, empirically, and methodologically: First, it rigorously examines prior research in the marketing-finance interface and synthesizes the findings in a conceptual overview of the field. Second, it examines investments into different drivers of customer-based firm value and relates them to different aspects of firm performance. Third, it develops a novel method to estimate investments in market-based assets for firms with undisclosed accounting information through textual analysis of legal statements.