www.elsevier.com/locate/technovation
a
Cranfield University School of Management, Cranfield, Bedford MK43 0AL, UK
School of Management, University of Southampton, Highfield, Southampton SO17 1BJ, UK
c
Cranfield University School of Management, Cranfield, Bedford MK43 0AL, UK
d
CRiSPS, University of Bath School of Management, Bath BA2 7AY, UK
Abstract
Research on the innovation process and its effective management has consistently highlighted a set of themes constituting good practice.
The limitation of such good practice is that it relates to what might be termed steady state innovation - essentially innovative activity in
product and process terms which is about doing what we do, but better. The prescription works well under these conditions of (relative)
stability in terms of products and markets but is not a good guide when elements of discontinuity come into the equation. Discontinuity arises
from shifts along technological, market, political and other frontiers and requires new or at least significantly adapted approaches to their
effective management. This paper explores relevant routines which organisations can implement to enable discontinuous innovation.
q 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Discontinuous innovation; Inter-firm learning; Managing innovation
* Corresponding author. Tel.: C123 475 4850; fax: C123 475 1806.
E-mail addresses: john.bessant@cranfield.ac.uk (J. Bessant), r.c.
lamming@soton.ac.uk (R. Lamming), hannah.noke@cranfield.ac.uk
(H. Noke), mnswp@management.bath.ac.uk (W. Phillips).
1
Tel.: C44 238 059 2559; fax: C44 238 059 3844.
2
Tel.: C44 123 475 4850.
3
Tel: C44 122 538 6650; fax: C44 122 538 3223.
1. Introduction
0166-4972/$ - see front matter q 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.technovation.2005.04.007
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4. Sources of discontinuity
As Utterback and others note, discontinuities can arise
with significant shifts along the technological frontier which
lead to a dislocation and create new conditions within which
innovation opportunities emerge (Utterback, 1994). Seizing
those opportunities requires a degree of organisational
agility which is often lacking in established incumbents but
a strength of new entrants. Equally new entrants may lack
knowledge, capital or other kinds of assets which enable
them to capitalise on the opportunities available. In either
case a precondition is having the organisational capability to
detect and respond to discontinuous changes.
The danger here is that we may assume that discontinuity
only takes one form and develop capability in that direction.
Technological shifts are an obvious example and many
organisations invest in R&D and technological intelligence
systems partly to counter the potential challenge or to
position themselves to pick up and respond more quickly.
But investment in R&D will not help if the fundamental
shift is in the market-placefor example, emergence of a
completely new market with different needs. (As Christensen points out, in the case of disruptive innovation in
industries like disk drives the technology involved was often
developed in the existing incumbents but taken up and used
by new entrants working with different market configurations)(Christensen, 1997). Equally having good market
antennae may not help if the issue is triggered by a
fundamental political shift or a sea change in public opinion.
Table 1 lists some typical sources of discontinuity and
highlights the difficulties facing otherwise smart organisations in detecting and dealing with them.
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Table 1
Sources of discontinuity
Triggers/
sources of discontinuity
Explanation
Problems posed
New market
emerges
New political
rules emerge
Running out
of road
Political conditions which shape the economic and social rules may shift dramaticallyfor example, the collapse of
communism meant an alternative model
capitalist, competitionas opposed to central planningand many ex-state firms
couldnt adapt their ways of thinking
Apple, Napster, Dell, Microsoft vs. traditional music industry (Prahalad, 2004)
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Table 1 (continued)
Triggers/
sources of discontinuity
Explanation
Problems posed
Deregulation/
shifts in regulatory regime
Fractures
along fault
lines
Unthinkable
events
Business
model innovation
Architectural
innovation
Changes at the level of the system architecture rewrite the rules of the game for
those involved at component level
Shifts in
techno-economic paradigmsystemic changes
which impact
whole sectors
or even whole
societies
Change takes place at system level, involving technology and market shifts. This
involves the convergence of a number of
trends which result in a paradigm shift
where the old order is replaced
www.Aamzon.com
Charles Schwab
Southwest, Easyjet, Ryanair and other low
cost airlines
(Hamel, 2000; Day and Schoemaker, 2004;
Prahalad, 2004)
Photo-lithography in chip manufacture
(Henderson and Clark, 1990; Henderson,
1994)
Industrial Revolution
1371
Table 2
Different innovation management archetypes
Interpretive schema
how the organisation
sees and makes sense of
the world
Strategic decision
making
Operating routines
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Degree of
uncertainty
(2) Uncover
(4) Co-evolve
(1) Exploit
(3) Flex
Degree of instability
Fig. 1.
Triggering the
process
Strategic
choice
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Implementation
Learn?
Fig. 2.
Table 3
Emergent good practice model outline for discontinuous innovation
Element in innovation model
Type 2 characteristics
Search at the peripherypick up and amplify weak signals (Day and Schoemaker, 2004)
Use multiple and alternative perspectives (Allen, 2001)
Manage the idea generation processenable systematic and high involvement in innovation (Bessant, 2003)
Develop an external scanning capability
Use technological antennae to seek out potential new technologies
Tune in to weak market signalse.g. working with fringe users, early trend locations (such as chat rooms on
Internet) (Moore, 1999)
Develop future exploring capabilityscenario and alternatives (de Geus, 1996)
Explore at periphery of firmsubsidiaries, joint ventures, distributors as sources of innovation
Bring in outside perspectives
Build pluralism into decision-making processes
Implementation
Innovation strategy
Innovative organization
Pro-active linkages
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9. Conclusions
Discontinuous innovation poses significant challenges
both for research and for practice. It is clear that managing
innovation under such conditions requires a new approach
and we have tried in this paper to explore some of the
dimensions of the alternative archetype required. It is also
clear from a wide range of studies that even otherwise
successful firms can run into difficulties in trying to deal
with this challenge underlining the need for active learning
around a new model.
This learning involves not only developing new capabilities within the enterprise but increasingly it raises
questions about system level innovation. Interactions with
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An example of such a co-laboratory for exploring with users the
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www.dif.org.uk.
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John Bessant is Professor of Innovation Management at the School of Management, Cranfield
University. He also holds a Fellowship of the
Advanced Institute for Management Research,
which he was awarded in 2003. He served on the
Business and Management panel of the 2001
Research Assessment Exercise. In 2003 he was
elected a Fellow of the British Academy of
Management.
Richard Lamming is Professor of Management and Director of the School of Management at the University of Southampton in the
UK. Before taking up this executive role he
was for 13 years CIPS Professor of Purchasing
and Supply Management at the University of
Bath School of Management. Before this,
while working at MIT and the University of
Sussex, Science Policy Research Unit, he was
part of a team that wrote The Machine That
Changed The World (1990), the best selling
manufacturing management book which introduced the concept of lean
production. Prof Lamming developed and published the principles of lean
supply in 1993, as an application of creative destruction in process
innovation in supply chain relationships. Since, that time his research has
been based upon developing theories within the lean supply paradigm, and
pursuing their implementation in a variety of industries.