Abstract
This book is directed at those who lead the spectacularly risky and complex technical, organizational, and economic challenges of creating product and service innovations. These leaders exist at all levels of a firm including: bench scientists, systems engineers, and product line architects; project managers who worry about day-to-day technical choices; product line planners and business strategists charged with the growth of product portfolios; directors of R&D, supply chains, and customer support; organizational design and human resource specialists; chief information officers, chief technology officers, vice presidents of engineering and marketing; and chief executive officers concerned about the survival and growth of their organization. These individuals, who are often scattered globally across complex innovation chains, make choices that decisively impact the success or failure of their firms’ innovation processes. The goal of this book is to help these leaders master their innovation challenges.
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- 1.
Lorenz’s discovery was initially reported in a 1963 article on a computation model, where the outcome was crucially altered when he entered the decimal.506 instead of entering the full.506127. He later used the image of butterflies to describe the potential for such altered outcomes in a 1972 speech to the American Academy of Advancement of Science.
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- 2.
Caveat: We use the terms “innovation butterfly” and “emergence” interchangeably. These terms are defined in the glossary. In our context, based on the norms of complexity science, emergent means that a system behavior evolves out of initial conditions. There are a number of other definitions and connotations of the term emergence either in the management or in the social science parlance. For instance, even in a traditional project, such a constructing a building, a project manager may face uncertainty, and term the intermediate and final outcomes of the construction process as “emergent.” We do not address such alternative views of “emergence.”
- 3.
See http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0062622/; also see Arthur C. Clark’s (1968) novel.
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Such situations result in severe questioning of initial plans, and they sometimes lead to litigation around assignment of responsibilities for the escalation of scope, delays and allied cost overrun. See:
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- 7.
This has been pointed out by Garud, R., Karnoe, P.: ‘Path Creation as a Process of Mindful Deviation’. In Path Dependence and Creation, R. Garud and P. Karnøe (eds.) Lawrence Erlbaum Associates: pp 1–38.
- 8.
Much of this evidence is documented in a set of interviews by S. Iwata, President of Nintendo. Two interviews were particularly helpful: Iwata asks: The Wii Remote. http://us.wii.com/iwata_asks/index.jsp. Accessed 13 June 2011 and Iwata asks: The Wii Hardware. http://us.wii.com/iwata_asks/index.jsp. Accessed 13 June 2011.
- 9.
Conway, L.: Why Senior Citizens Love the Wii. http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2009/07/why_senior_citizens_love_the_w.html (2009).
- 10.
Quote from Genyo Takeda in Iwata, S.: Iwata Asks: The Wii remote. Retrieved from http://us.wii.com/iwata_asks/index.jsp. Accessed 13 June (2011).
- 11.
Glen, P., Maister, D.H., Bennis, W.G.: Leading Geeks: How to Manage and Lead People Who Deliver Technology. Jossey-Bass (2002).
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- 14.
- 15.
Van Creveld, M.L.: Command in War. Harvard University Press (2003).
- 16.
The particular challenges of videogame development and how agile development processes are suited to meeting them are discussed further in Chap. 5.
- 17.
Our view builds on Thomke’s (2003) work that makes a case for systematic experimentation and learning during innovation processes. We add the elements of adaptive search and distributed leadership to this view of innovation.
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Thomke, S.: Experimentation Matters: Unlocking the Potential of New Technologies for Innovation. Harvard Business School Press (2003).
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- 18.
Fleming and Sorenson describe foundational issues associated with technological searches. Loch et al. discuss the risk management implications of such searches during the management of innovation projects. We build on these ideas by pointing out that path dependence, along with market feedback, alters the underlying search landscape across generations of development projects.
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Fleming, L., Sorenson, O.: Science as a map in technological search. Strategic Manage. J. 25(8–9), 909–928 (2004).
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Loch, C., DeMeyer, A., Pich, M.: Managing the Unknown: A New Approach to Managing High Uncertainty and Risk in Projects. Wiley (2006).
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- 19.
The idea of modular actions as a basis for maneuver-driven competition draws upon the work of Clark and Baldwin:
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Clark, K.B., Baldwin, C.: Design Rules. Vol. 1: The Power of Modularity. MIT Press (2000).
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- 20.
The exact origin of the ABC technique is unknown. See Stevenson, W., Hojati, M.: Operations Management: McGraw-Hill/Irwin (2005), for a description.
- 21.
- 22.
Shatner, W.: Up Till Now: The Autobiography. Macmillan (2008).
- 23.
Colleagues David Ford and Tim Taylor have studied situations where innovation processes cross over a tipping point that separates success from failure. They use arguments that are analogous to our discussions in part I to describe—(a) how either external forces or internal structure can push a project out of control and to failure and (b) how the delayed and nonlinear impacts of a corrected external problem can cause a project’s internal dynamics to evolve from success into failure.
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Ford, D.N., Sterman, J.D.: Overcoming the 90% syndrome: iteration management in concurrent development projects. Concurr. Eng. Res. Appl. 11(3), 177–186 (2003).
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Taylor, T., Ford, D.N.: Tipping point failure and robustness in single development projects. Syst. Dyn. Rev. 22(1), 51–71 (2006).
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Taylor, T., Ford, D.N.: Managing tipping point dynamics in complex construction projects. ASCE J. Constr. Eng. Manage. 134(6), 421–431 (2008).
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Anderson, E.G., Joglekar, N.R. (2012). Mastering the Innovation Butterfly. In: The Innovation Butterfly. Understanding Complex Systems. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-3131-2_1
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