Corporate Innovation
Citation:
Vojak, Price, and Griffin (2010). “Corporate Innovation” in Froedeman, Klein, and Mitcham (eds.) Oxford Handbook of Interdisciplinarity (Oxford University Press).
Abstract:
A common if somewhat contentious distinction is often made between invention, as the isolated creation of something new that can be patented, and innovation, as the process of converting something new into a market success, which is less often subject to patent protection (McKeown 2008). It has also on occasion been remarked that the era of the independent inventor is past; according to one biographer, Philo Fansworth, the engineer of television, was “the last lone inventor” (Schwartz 2002). We have seen a shift from independent invention and innovation to basic scientific discovery taking place predominantly in the academic world with follow-on technological creation taking place as firm-based invention and innovation. Most innovation in today’s complex world requires inputs from multiple disciplines, and thus is accomplished by firms using interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary teams. However, there are individuals in most technology-based corporations who first act as inventors, and then go on and implement the invention as a successful innovation into the marketplace. Furthermore, these individuals are likely to do this over and over again.
Those who are repeatedly successful in the practice of truly breakthrough corporate innovations, who we will call Serial Innovators (SIs), exhibit a combination of broad and deep technical skills, unique insight into business issues (including customer needs, marketing, finance and manufacturing), the creativity to see connections between the two, a political savvy that gets their projects accepted for commercialization, and the facilitative capability to shepherd an innovation through an organization and into the marketplace. This is a blending of different types of expertise that creates individual interdisciplinarity that is almost never appreciated in academic discussions of interdisciplinarity. Complementing other approaches, then, we describe SIs and the processes they use. By way of interpretation, we also observe that SI skills of integration are consistent with Michael Polanyi’s epistemology and offer an illustration of corporate innovation interdisciplinarity as tacit integration. We close by suggesting that a key feature of interdisciplinarity is the seeking of coherence and regularities across, and independent of, a wide range of disciplinary boundaries or restrictions, as is well exhibited by SIs.