Open Innovation

Corporate Incubator

Pascal Latouche

• Publisher: Wiley-ISTE
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781786303240
• eBook ISBN: 9781119579137
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Negocios y empresa
• Subtopic: Gestión

The corporate start-up incubator is currently developing in large companies as an essential approach to open innovation. It faces a global system involving varied contexts, issues and actors. Its implementation is an art and to succeed the corporate incubator must become a real "interaction architect". Using testimonials and real case studies, the author takes a dive into the structural and social mysteries of corporate incubators. By analyzing the complex mechanisms of interactions, this book decrypts and reveals the keys to the success of these devices and to opening innovation in a broad sense. The concept of an "interaction architect" is related to the art of building fruitful interactions within human systems. Being aware that social systems exist is good, but knowing how to manage them is better.

1
Innovation: a Story Without an End

While writing these lines, I repeatedly wondered about the wisdom of including this first chapter in the book. It may seem in some ways, due to certain theoretical aspects, to be an academic approach. In fact, it is nothing of the sort. This book is intended for the widest audience, academics as well as practitioners. Nevertheless, I want to express things in depth, that is, without amateurism or vulgarization which is insulting to the intelligence, while remaining accessible to all those who, for want of time or inclination, are removed from academic matters. The reverse is also true. Those among you who are academics will doubtless find herein elements stemming from the experiences of managers in business. I have not wanted to take short-cuts, but, on the contrary, to fully reveal to you my path. This is a delicate approach to introduce my subject, CI, which can divide itself and you will understand that my aim is rather to gather it together.

MI and OI are two notions which I seek to characterize in this chapter, so as to allow you to take your first steps into the mysteries of CI. It is difficult to conceive of this Trojan horse without raising the question of the fundamental materials allowing it to be imagined and built. I am afraid that the Greeks would not have been able to build the Trojan horse if they had not previously possessed knowledge about wood, and if a certain Greek (Odysseus) had not imagined it and if he were not helped to build it by other Greeks. Consider, then, the following parts of this chapter to be sharing knowledge about wood which is useful for understanding how CI can be imagined, and how it can subsequently be built.

This chapter covers the work of academics and institutions on managerial innovation and on open innovation. It proposes a fair balance between the work of specialists, which may be indigestible for some managers, and those of commentators and influencers, whose opinions we often cannot be sure are based on serious analyses. I also share in a digestible manner – I hope – certain notions about MI and OI which constitute the framework of this work, and reflections and recommendations related to it.

It would require a very long discussion to precisely define the concept of innovation, which is so diverse and multifaceted. For my part, I think that it depends on the perception of those for whom it is intended. It may involve goods and services, for example, as well as ways of acting. Thus, to understand even a little of this notion of innovation allows us to better grasp one singular feature: we may innovate from a management point of view (managerial innovation – MI) in order to innovate better in terms of products and services. This is not really new. In fact, Schumpeter, as well known in the academic sphere as among practitioners, as early as 1934 distinguished five categories of innovation, including organizational innovation which he defined as the realization of a new productive organization (groups, conglomerates, limited liability companies) or new market structures (oligopolies, monopolies). For this author, a company must develop a form of organization which allows it to take advantage of scientific inventions, the company itself considered to be the result of a series of organizational innovations. Schumpeter’s notion of organizational innovation may thus be considered the ancestor of another notion, managerial innovation, which we certainly hear about so often these days.

This evolution is not the product of semantic chance. In fact, it conceals lessons which have been more than useful to me in responding to the problem I was trying to solve. Although I will go into detail about all this in the following, I will not resist the temptation to give you an overview of it. In fact, to address the topic of managerial practices, I have rejected considering structure as such – that is, disembodied – and on the contrary, I want to take into account the interplay of actors and practices implemented by the managers of these structures for a specific purpose. I believe that it is through this double prism that we may reveal the managerial work carried out by managers of structures, and particularly the managers of new structures, e.g. OI, a managerial novelty which has become necessary in recent years.

1.1. The concept of managerial innovation (MI)

In this first section, I will mainly describe MI. For this, I will first draw up a brief history of the concept up until its democratization in the 2000s. Then, I will concentrate more particularly on the characteristics which can be extracted from the main definitions of MI.

1.1.1. Evolution up until the 1990s

Up until the 1990s, some major authors (Evan, 1966; Evan and Black, 1967; Downs and Mohr, 1976; Daft, 1978; Kimberly, 1981; Damanpour, 1988; Van de Ven, 1986; Harrow and Willcocks, 1990; Rogers, 1995) were primarily interested in innovations which did not have a technological character. We will see that this aspect of innovation is particularly enriched by diverse thoughts, showing throughout that the accumulation of knowledge truly allows advances in the understanding of particular phenomena.

The first authors (1960s to 1980s) did not yet strictly speaking use the term managerial innovation, but rather organizational or administrative innovation, in reference to Schumpeter. They attempted to describe non-technological innovations as new organizational methods and practices. In particular, their works show the emergence of the perspective of “adoption” of organizational innovation, an important concept in the context of this work.

In particular, it is with Kimberly in 1981 that an essential turning point occurs. For the first time in the literature, he introduced the expression “managerial innovation”, seeking precisely to distinguish this latter from all other forms of innovation. He defined it as: “any program, product or technique which represents a significant departure from the state of management at the moment where it appears for the first time and where it affects the nature, location, or the quantity of information available in a decision-making process”.

For this author, speaking of “managerial innovation“ instead of “organizational innovation” aims to take into account the concept, not only as a method or a practice (organization), but also as a vehicle whose appropriation is motivated by a goal (strategy). This approach capitalizing on the managerial dimension allows us to take into account not only an organizational dimension, but also a strategic dimension, and consequently to explore numerous questions such as invention, adoption or even dissemination.

In the 1980s and 1990s, other authors clarified the distinctive characteristics of MI with regard to all other forms of innovation. This involved grounding MI in the field of en...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Innovation: a Story Without an End
• 2 Incubators and Other Accelerators: the Joys of Diversity?
• 3 The Architects of Interactions: the Four Strategic Access Points
• 4 Topography: the Characteristics of a Structure
• 5 Adaptation in situ: Levers for Manipulation
• 6 When Practice Becomes the Model to Follow: the Adoption of CI
• 7 CI Example A: the “Boss’s Thing”
• 8 CI Example B: Money doesn’t make you happy
• 9 CI Example C: Reducing the Wide Gap
• 10 CI Example D: “Two-pillar” Centralism
• 11 CI Example E: the Art of Pivot
• Conclusion
• References
• Index
• End User License Agreement