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THE DYNAMICS OF GAMES OF INNOVATION

École Polytechnique Montréal, C.P. 6079, Succursale Centre-Ville, Montreal, H3C 3A7, Canada

Jarislowsky Professor of Innovation and Project Management.

and

Department of Management and Technology, Université du Québec à Montréal, 405, Rue Sainte-Catherine Est, Montreal, H2L 2C4, Canada

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https://doi.org/10.1142/S1363919607001618Cited by:2 (Source: Crossref)

Abstract

Many executives see innovation as an unmanageable process, riddled with risks. The research we conducted with the Industrial Research Institute, interviewing over 200 vice-presidents of research and development and chief technical officers in many sectors around the world, yields a more nuanced view. Innovation becomes manageable once managers move away from normative prescriptions that view the process as uniform and recognise that different rules and practices apply to different circumstances.

Our argument is that clusters of interdependent firms contributing to the building of a set of interacting products and services tend to self-organise themselves into distinct and relatively persistent "games of innovation". Such games operate at a meso level of analysis, grouping together many complementary agents, such as competitors, suppliers, public regulators, universities, innovation-support agencies, and venture capitalists. Six games of innovation, each with a distinct set of rules for innovating, have been identified around value-creation exchanges between buyers and sellers. Three games focus on market creation: "patent-driven discovery", "systems integration" and "platform orchestration". Market maintenance games are "cost-based competition", "systems extension and engineering" and "customised mass production".

The perspective proposed in this paper recognises that heterogeneous innovation patterns and strategies can coexist within a single industrial sector and that the same game can be played in many sectors. Specific conditions call for distinct rules and practices. Customer expectations, for example, are central in some games but almost irrelevant in others. Rules for managing innovation are neither generic best practices that can be applied universally nor narrow industry recipes. They are game- and role-specific ways to create and capture market value.

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