The Routledge Companion to Innovation Management

Jin Chen, Alexander Brem, Eric Viardot, Poh Kam Wong, Jin Chen, Alexander Brem, Eric Viardot, Poh Kam Wong

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367656065
• eBook ISBN: 9781351997065
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Innovation contributes to corporate competitiveness, economic performance and environmental sustainability. In the Internet era, innovation intelligence is transferred across borders and languages at an unprecedented rate, yet the ability to benefit from it seems to become more divergent among different corporations and countries. How much an organization can benefit from innovation largely depends on how well innovation is managed in it. Thus, there is a discernible increase in interest in the study of innovation management. This handbook provides a comprehensive guide to this subject.

The handbook introduces the basic framework of innovation and innovation management. It also presents innovation management from the perspectives of strategy, organization and resource, as well as institution and culture. The book's comprehensive coverage on all areas of innovation management makes this a very useful reference for anyone interested in the subject.

Chapter 5 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/9781315276670

Part I
Introduction to innovation and innovation management

1
Innovation and innovation management

JinChen, Eric Viardot and Alexander Brem

Value of innovation

Innovation and human development

The history of mankind is one of innovation, especially our great economic leaps over the past two centuries (Fu and Gong, 2011). The Renaissance in the 14th century shattered backward thoughts by introducing new thinking. The navigation rush in the 15th century expanded the bounds of human civilization. The scientific revolution, which began in the 16th century, laid the foundation for the technological revolution. The capital market, which was born in the beginning of the 17th century, made financial activities a widespread phenomenon in society. The Industrial Revolution, which began in the 18th century, gave a great impetus to economies around the world. Although current economic theories and other doctrines fail to explain all these phenomena perfectly, many scholars have identified a common factor – innovation – in the chain of historical events (Chen, 2017b).

Alec Foege, author of The Tinkerers: The Amateurs, DIYers, and Inventors Who Make America Great, referred to innovators – amateurs, DIYers and inventors who enjoyed fiddling with small devices and inventions – as “tinkerers” (meaning “工匠” when translated into Chinese), to whom he attributed the miracle of America: “American tinkerers are a group of independent people who make world-changing inventions and innovations with sheer willpower and tenacity”. For example, Benjamin Franklin, Eli Whitney, Cyrus McCormick, Thomas Edison and the Wright brothers were outstanding innovators in human history. Such inventors come these days from emerging markets like India (“jugaad”) and Brazil (“gambiarra”) but also from China (Agarwal, Grottke, Mishra, and Brem, 2017; Wimschneider, Agarwal, and Brem, 2018).

There, a new round of technological and industrial revolutions is forthcoming as a radical change in the global industrial structure and competition pattern begins to arise (Chen, Zhao, and Wang, 2014). Disruptive innovations that may make a breakthrough in the future are of great importance to our “technology-economy-society” pattern (Christensen, Baumann, Ruggles, and Sadtler, 2006).

The National Economic Council and the Office of Science and Technology Policy issued the newest version of the Strategy for American Innovation at the end of October 2015, announcing the commitment to the development of nine strategic areas (as shown in Table 1.1).

Table 1.1 Nine strategic areas in the Strategy for American Innovation

S. No.	Area	Description
11	Advanced manufacturing	A National Network for Manufacturing Innovation will be launched to restore the nation’s lead at the cutting edge of manufacturing innovation.
22	Precision medicine	Precision medicine will boost developments in genomics, large data sets and health information technology while protecting privacy. It gives clinicians tools to better understand the complex mechanisms underlying a patient’s health, disease or condition and to better predict which treatments will be most effective.
33	Brain initiative	A deepened knowledge of how brains work, based on genetics, will help scientists and doctors diagnose and treat neurological disorders.
44	Advanced vehicles	Breakthrough developments in sensing, computing and data science will bring vehicle-to-vehicle communication and cutting-edge autonomous technology safety features into commercial deployment.
55	Smart cities	An emerging community of civic leaders, data scientists, technologists and companies are joining forces to build “smart cities”.
66	Clean energy and energy-efficient technologies	The administration will continue to deploy and develop clean energy technologies, fund climate-change solutions and increase new energy production while improving America’s energy security.
77	Educational technology	The president has proposed to give 99 percent of students access to high-speed broadband by 2018. And the 2016 budget includes $50 million for the creation of an Advanced Research Projects Agency for Education.
88	Space	America will make core investments in the development of commercial crew space transportation capability by 2017. America will also invest in research on the protection of astronauts from space radiation, on advanced propulsion systems and on technologies that allow humans to live in outer space.
99	New frontiers in computing	In July 2015, the president created the National Strategic Computing Initiative to spur the creation and deployment of computing technology at the leading edge, helping advance administration priorities for economic competitiveness, scientific discovery and national security.

In May 2013, McKinsey Global Institute released Disruptive Technologies: Advances That Will Transform Life, Business and the Global Economy by 2025,¹ a report that estimated the direct impact of these technologies on the global economy between $14 and $33 trillion. Table 1.2 provides the details on the major technologies and areas.

Innovation and national/regional competitiveness

Currently scientific progress and innovation play a decisive role in economic and social development in the world (Chen, Yin, and Mei, 2018). An entity, whether as big as a country or as small as an enterprise, will miss the opportunity of proactive future development if it fails to grab self-developed core technology or intellectual property (IP) assets instrumental in innovation activities. Economists have attributed the fast growth of the world economy following World War II to a push for technological innovation.

Table 1.2 Twelve disruptive technologies

S. No.	Area	Description	Potential economic impact on the world by 2025
11	Mobile Internet	Smaller, viewable, wearable and more powerful mobile computing devices with more sensors benefit consumers with improved medical and educational services, and elevate employee productivity.	$373 mln-$10.8 tln
22	Automation of knowledge work	This automation technology applies primarily to ordinary business operation (e.g. marketing, customer service and administrative support), social services (e.g. education and medical care), technology industries (e.g. science, engineering and IT) and professional services (law and finance).	$523 mln-$6.7 tln, equivalent to 120 mln-140 mln full-time jobs
33	IoT (Internet of Things)	IoT has the biggest economic impact on medical care and manufacturing. It is also applied to smart grids, urban infrastructure, resource exploitation, agriculture and automobiles.	$273 mln-$6.2 tln
44	Cloud	Cloud technology means a simpler, faster, more powerful and more efficient digital world that creates great value for consumers as well as enterprises, which can manage information more efficiently and flexibly.	$173 mln-$6.2 tln
55	Advanced robotics	Advanced robotics covers primarily industrial robotics, surgical robotics, exoskeleton robotics, prosthetic robotics, service robotics and domestic robotics.	$173 mln-$4.5tln
66	Autonomous and near-autonomous vehicles	Safer, less congestion, more time savings, less fuel consumption and less emissions.	$23 mln-$1.9 tln; can save 30,000–150,000 lives
77	Next-generation genomics	Next-generation genomics quickens advances in biology and applies primarily to the diagnosis and treatment of diseases, agriculture and biofuel production.	$70 mln-$1.6 tln
88	Energy storage	The technology applies primarily to electrical/hybrid vehicles, distributed energy, utilities and energy storage.	$90 bln-$635 bln
99	3D printing	Major applications include consumers, direct product manufacturing, tool and die making and bioprinting of tissue and organs.	$230 bln-$550 bln
110	Advanced nanomaterials	Advanced nanomaterials have found extensive application in medical care, electronics, composite materials, solar cells, desalination and catalyzers, but the cost is higher. Nanomedical materials have very great potential to be used for targeted cancer therapy.	$150 bln-$500 bln
111	Advanced oil and gas exploration and recovery	Shale gas and light crude oil exploration and recovery, primarily in North America.	$95 bln-$460 bln
112	Renewable energy	By 2025 wind power and solar power may increase from 2% to 16% of global electricity generation.	$165 bln-$275 bln; equivalent to 1 bln to 1.2 bln less tons of carbon emissions

Source: Chunping (2016).

Innovation has been widely recognized as the main driver and first impetus for a sustainable regional or national economic growth, as well as global competency (Acs, Audretsch, Lehmann, and Licht, 2017; Brem and Viardot, 2017). Especially for those emerging economies, it’s no longer a useful tool for them to depend on international trade or labor-intensive work such as manufacturing. The marginal benefit from labor investment is decreasing, while the returns of investment in new technology are increasing, which becomes a new driving force for the emerging economics to obtain a competitive advantage in the global market (Aguirre-Bastos and Weber, 2018). Both developed and developing countries are trying to build up their national innovation system in order to cultivate creative talents, high-tech based start-ups and new technology that could be translated into sustainable power for industrial upgrading and economic growth (Chen, 2017a). This is also the main reason why Asian countries such as South Korea, Japan, China and India continue to increase their domestic expenditure on research and development (R&D), sharing the largest proportion of the worldwide R&D expenditure, about 42.9 percent in 2017, according to the 2017 Annual Global R&D Funding Forecast.² For example, South Korea ranks number one in national innovation competitiveness among all the countries in 2018, according to the 2018 Bloomberg Innovation Index.³ China moved up two spots to 19th, buoyed by its high proportion of new science and engineering graduates in the labor force and an increasing number of patents by innovators such as Huawei Technologies Co., and is the first-ever developing country who gets a position in the top 20 most innovative countries in history.

Innovation is a double-edged sword in terms of social impact (Martin, 2016). On the one hand, many innovative products make our life better. For example, the plane and the high-speed rail make travel faster, and Apple smart devices have changed our lifestyle fundamentally. A large number of new products and services are delivered to every corner of the world. An increasing share of the public can have access to more plentiful food, life neces...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Part I Introduction to innovation and innovation management
• Part II The strategic perspective of innovation
• Part III The organizational perspective of innovation
• Part IV Institutions and norms for innovation management
• Part V Methodologies for innovation management
• Index