Harvaed Business Review, 3 articles on Innovation

The July-August 2004 Harvard Business Review had 3 articles on innovation.

Darwin and the Demon, Innovating Within Established Enterpises, by Geoffrey A. Moore.
Moore draws a life-cycle model and shows that enterprises must mutate the core comptences over time to sustain attractive returne. There is Application, Disruptive, Product, Process, Experimental, Marketing, Business Model, and Structural Innovation.

In Rosabeth Moss Kanter’s The Middle Manager as Innovator, shows that change masters don’t sit in the executive suite, but they’re not on the margins, either. They are consummate insiders who get things done by working through other people. Because middle managers have their fingers on the pulse of operations, they can conceive, suggest, and set in motion new ideas that top managers may not have thoutht of. Creative managers listen to a stream of information from superiors and peers and then identify a preceived need. The most successful innovations derive from situations where a number of people from a number of areas make contributions. To tackle and solve tricky problems, people need both the opportunities and the incentives to reach beyond their formal jobs.

Value Innovation, The Strategic Logic of High Growth, by W. Chan Kim and Rene’e Mauborgne, discusses high growth companies that have managers make sense of how they do business. Many companies view business oppartunities through the lens of their existing assets and capabilities.
One of the most striking findings is that despite the profound impact of a company’s stretgic logic, that logic is often not articulated. And because it goes unstated and unexamined, a company does not necessarily apply stratic logic across its business.