Institutionalizing An Innovation Competency Through People

Launch Date: 2010

Expected Wrap-up Date: Fall 2014

This ROR is investigating how firms develop innovation workforce excellence and career paths for innovation experts as a mechanism for institutionalizing a breakthrough innovation capability.  The primary research question is what roles do talent development and talent management practices play in institutionalizing breakthrough innovation capability?

This project is phase three of a series of ROR working groups studying the management processes associated with radical or breakthrough innovation (Radical Innovation, 1995 and Radical Innovation 2, 2000-09). Previous work uncovered the severe problem of a lack of promising career paths for innovation experts in large established companies. 

The working group's methodology is to conduct a longitudinal study of eleven companies over a three year time span.  Members can engage in the project by participating in discussions and efforts to develop a better understanding of challenges and solutions to institutionalizing breakthrough innovation through people and finalizing and testing a survey on accessing, evaluating and developing breakthrough innovation talent.

Members can support this project by completing the Breakthrough Innovation Survey.

Project Insights

Incubation experts serve an important role. Companies face a challenge in clarifying roles for Breakthrough Innovation beyond exploratory research…what happens after the invention or technical opportunity surfaces?  What happens if it’s not clearly and easily aligned with the Business Units or the company’s traditional business models?  Individuals can develop expertise at incubating business opportunities. This means that keeping these people engaged and rewarding them for their work would be helpful for a company that wants to develop expertise at Breakthrough Innovation. 

Why support Institutionalizing An Innovation Competency Through People?

 

PepsiCo created two new breakthrough innovation organizations several years ago. This ROR topic is very timely for us as we are just now beginning to wrestle with the day-to-day and career challenges of managing folks working on risky projects in organizations with longer-range research agendas.

Ted Farrington
Director, Process Technology Research Center
PepsiCo

Members can support this project by completing the Breakthrough Innovation Survey.

Participants in Institutionalizing Innovation Competency are:

Co-Chairs:
Ted Farrington, Pepsico
Bruce Kirk, Corning

Subject Matter Experts:
Gina O'Connor, RPI 
Lois Peters, RPI

Member Roster (log-on required) 

Member Companies represented: