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NEW BOOK:
Outsmarting the Upstarts
 Radical
innovation does happen in big corporations—but it's the exception
rather than the rule. Making it sustainable and routine requires
visionary leadership, markedly different management techniques,
and an entrepreneurial team that can "manage chaos,"
say six management professors at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
In their new book, Radical Innovation: How Mature Companies
Can Outsmart Upstarts (Harvard Business School Press), the
Rensselaer team lays out a manifesto for managing corporate innovation.
"The business model these days is more than 'build a better
mousetrap,'" says Mark Rice, director of the Severino Center
for Technological Entrepreneurship. "Firms need to build
a different mousetrap. If they don't do it, a competitor will—and
will drive them out of the market."
Rice is one
of six Rensselaer management professors who have followed top-secret
research projects at 10 major corporations. Funded by a significant
grant from the Sloan Foundation in partnership with the Industrial
Research Institute, the research examined radical innovation at
Air Products, Analog Devices, DuPont, GE, GM, IBM, Nortel Networks,
Polaroid, Texas Instruments, and United Technologies.
The researchers
found that creating the culture of entrepreneurship within a big
corporation is no easy task, but sustaining that culture was a
real management conundrum-"an unnatural act," says Richard
Leifer, associate professor of management.
"Traditional
management and marketing techniques just don't work when applied
to radically new technologies," says Gina O'Connor, assistant
professor of marketing and another member of the research team.
But established
firms are learning some new tricks. Texas Instruments, for example,
developed the Digital Micro-Mirror Device, capable of creating
a high-quality screen image by bouncing light off 1.3 million
microscopic bidirectional mirrors squeezed onto a one-square-inch
chip. The technology will displace rolling movie films and has
opened up an entirely new infrastructure for distributing motion
pictures to theaters.
CONTACT: Theresa Bourgeois, (518) 276-2840,
bourgt@rpi.edu
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