A "call from practice" for strategic management of discontinuous technologies and radical innovation.

By Robert Morris
NOTE: The copy I have identifies co-authors, Gaston Trauffler and Hugo P. Tschirky.

By now, I have become convinced that an organization's performance in two separate but related areas - management of knowledge and of innovation - will probably determine whether or not it survives. That is why I recently read with great interest this book as well as Francois Dupuy's Sharing Knowledge. Think about it: An organization can neither initiate change nor respond effectively to it without sufficient information; the same is true when an organization must assimilate radical and incremental innovation management, and do so over an extended period of time.

In the final chapter of Sustained Innovation Management, Gaston Trauffler and Hugo P. Tschirky observe that "Rare are those companies that actively seize the challenge of designing their management approaches and organizational structures in a way that takes competitive advantage of discontinuous technologies or that actively and constantly generates radical innovations. The poor performance of companies meeting this challenge is rooted in two main gaps. On the one hand, the understanding of implications of today's management approaches for this management challenge is missing. On the other hand, there is a lack of applicable concepts for the strategic management of discontinuous technologies and radical innovation." Trauffler and Tschirky wrote this book this book to share what their years of research, and, to provide their analysis of what they perceive to be the nature and implications of those revelations.

They carefully organize their material within six chapters. First, they describe the "call from practice and the management encounters when challenged by the management of radical innovation and discontinuous technologies." They then shift their attention to a review of relevant research currently available. Next, they analyze state-of-the-art management practices as revealed in three corporate case studies. In Chapter 4, they offer a new management approach for strategically managing radical innovations, share the results of several interviews, and cite other corporate case studies. In the next chapter, they describe management principles that "purely address management's concern in management summary style." Finally, the share their "outlook" and then provide a management summary.

For me, some of the most valuable material in the book is provided in Chapter 4 as Trauffler and Tschirky introduce a concept whose development is based on the nine propositions [identified on Pages 77-78] that suggest a possible design of processes, methods, and structures that will enable a practitioner-oriented planning concept for sustained innovation management." There are four development phases, each of which involves several process phases: identification, evaluation, decision and implementation. When concluding this important chapter, Trauffler and Tschirky offer a necessary disclaimer, noting that "the concept designed to fulfill all of the nine propositions is one possible solution for the strategic management of sustained innovation. It thus represents one potential contribution to the lack of concepts for successfully mastering sustained innovation. It should not be regarded as the [begin italics] only effective way [end italics] to achieve sustained innovation. Further, the concept is focused exclusively on the procedure of strategic innovation planning. There may be other factors that also play an important role besides choosing the right procedure for planning." Indeed there are.

More a quibble than a complaint, Trauffler and Tschirky frequently insert references to other sources as well as to case studies and illustrations. For example, "the stability that organizations are naturally striving for (Scigliano, 2003:9) has clearly disintegrated over the last few decades (D'Aveni, 1994: 227; Nault and Vandenbosch, 1998: 171)." Although this is obviously an issue of style and format, I think it is very irritating; worse yet, it disrupts the flow of the prose narrative and distracts at least this reader's attention from the otherwise solid material.

That said, this is an especially informative and thought-provoking book in which Trauffler and Tschirky make a strong argument for companies making an organizational commitment to effective management of sustained innovation to initiate as well as respond to discontinuous technology changes. As they themselves suggest, "to seize the challenge of designing their management approaches and organizational structures in a way that takes competitive advantage of discontinuous technologies or that actively and constantly generates radical innovations."

Those who share my high regard for this book are urged to check out Seeing What's Next co-authored by Clayton M. Christensen, Scott D. Anthony, and Erik A. Roth. Also, Henry Chesbrough's Open Innovation and Open Business Models, W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne's Blue Ocean Strategy, Enterprise Architecture as Strategy co-authored by Jeanne W. Ross, Peter Weill, and David Robertson, Dean R. Spitzer's Transforming Performance Management, and Richard Ogle's Smart World.