New book on Technological Innovation Management

NESTA recently hosted a book launch for a new book called "The Management of Technological Innovation", by Mark Dodgson, David Gann and Ammon Salter.

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The book aims to provide an up to date MBA level text book on the management of technological innovation, and it slots in before their more advanced and adventurous innovation book Think, Play, Do: Technology, Innovation, and Organization.


The books' DNA comes out of the Tanaka Business School at Imperial College, London, with all three authors being either faculty members or, in Mark Dodgson's case, a visiting professor. "The Management of Technological Innovation" uses more than fifty up to date case studies from around the world to demonstrate their points, making this a relatively easy book to learn from and dip in and out of - remember, however, that this is a text book and it is not really an "easy" read; it is still peppered with references and the bibliography, which is useful in its own right, is 28 pages long.

Strategies for knowing where to innovate

Most organisations know that they want to be innovative, but where should they innovate? To know were to innovate (assuming one has limited resources and can not innovate perfectly everywhere...) organisatons need to know what their strategy is.

One of the tried and tested frameworks for strategy development is Professor Michael Porter's five competitive forces that shape strategy, which he has recently updated.

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Porter's original paper was published in the Harvard Business Review in 1979, titled "How Competitive Forces Shape Strategy" - in the January 2008 edition of the HBR he has updated the original article, titled "The Five Competitive Forces Shape Strategy", to include more modern case studies and to generally make it more relevant to today. His original thesis, however, has not changed.

Porter's analysis indicates that the same five forces still shape competition today, namely:

• The threat of new entrants
• The bargaining power of buyers
• The threat of substitute products or services
• The Bargaining power of suppliers
• Rivalry among existing competitors

So where to exert one's efforts in innovation and where is it a waste of time/money or even counter productive?

Porter's article lays out a framework within which to undertake the strategic analysis ...