Innovation Games: A New Approach to the Competitive Challenge
´ Roger Miller, Xavier Olleros and Luis Molinie
Innovation is often perceived as an unmanageable phenomenon. Bets are placed on new products with the hope that a few winners will compensate for the many losers. At best, sophisticated selection procedures impose a certain discipline and provide guidance for containing costly errors. The research that we have conducted yields a more nuanced view. Innovation, we have found, becomes manageable when managers move away from universalistic prescriptions and recognise that different rules and practices apply in different contexts. Our main argument is that both executives and public officials need to learn from the new realities of innovation. Instead of being a uniform process, innovation takes place in seven distinct ‘games’, focusing on market creation, market maintenance and innovator support. Rules for managing innovation are neither generic best practices that can be applied universally, nor narrow industry-specific recipes. Instead, distinct contexts call for specific strategies and rules to create and capture market value. Thus, innovation games are not predetermined sets of rules but leave ample room for creative competition and collaboration. Our approach urges business executives and academics to reassess the validity of conventional approaches, no matter how well established. Managers should worry far less about imitating industry best practices, and more about correctly gauging strategic issues. The first order of business for all players should be to turn potential negative-sum games into positive-sum games.
Ó 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Introduction
Many managers and analysts see innovation as an unmanageable phenomenon, riddled with great uncertainty
