Your Innovation Partners Matter More Than You Think: Lessons from Coopetitive Portfolios

Successful innovation often depends on collaborating with the right partners. In fact, firms need to strategically combine partnerships with competitors (coopetition), customers, suppliers, and universities to improve product innovation outcomes. The findings show that coopetition works best as part of a broader, yet well-configured collaboration strategy, offering practical lessons for managers designing innovation ecosystems.

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Rural Entrepreneurship

Rethinking Rural Entrepreneurship

As opposed to urban entrepreneurship, rural ventures are often viewed through a narrow stereotypical lens, either as struggling against economic hardships or as quaint operations with limited innovation and impact. This blog challenges these stereotypes and presents a fresh approach to understanding and supporting the diversity of rural entrepreneurship.

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Unlocking the Power of Isolation for Exploratory Innovation

While intra-firm collaboration is often seen as key to successful innovation, excessive collaboration can hinder this. Understanding when to stimulate collaboration and when to foster isolation can help firms navigate the innovation landscape more effectively and create new innovations more successfully.

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Innovation in the underground of organizations

What do 3M’s masking tape, Xerox’s laser printer, and The Godfather movies have in common? These innovations were developed by employees who did not tell their managers. In the academic literature, this phenomenon is also known as underground innovation. From our study at Ford Motor Company, it seems that underground innovation is way more common than previously thought.

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