Tea Lempiälä

Balanced innovation front end measurement: Discontinuous innovation approach

The front-end phase is in the literature generally regarded as the most critical phase of the innovation process. This is due to its inherent uncertain and ambiguous nature and its significant potential to improve overall innovation capability in industrial firms. The front-end phase precedes and feeds the new product development project phase by creating a continuous stream of new incremental, discontinuous and radical product concepts. Such a comprehensive measurement system dealing with the front-end phase of innovation process in the discontinuous context makes it possible for the people responsible for the innovation activities to get a picture of the efficiency of innovation process front-end and effectiveness of outcomes and impacts. This paper describes conceptually the theoretical backgrounds, a tentative idea and first managerial implications of a method, Balanced Innovation Front-End Measurement BIFEM, we are going to develop and test in 30 Finnish, German and USA companies during next two years.

Innovators and managers as equal navigators of the paradox between ambiguity and clarity

How do innovators and managers navigate the paradoxical tension between the need to embrace ambiguity and inflict clarity in their innovation practice? This is the question we set out to investigate in this paper. We examine the innovation practice of both managers and innovators, and demonstrate how this tension is constantly present in the daily activities of both actor groups. Much of the extant research has, often implicitly, positioned innovators and their managers on opposite sides of this tension, representing managers as representatives of clarity and innovators as thriving in ambiguity. In particular, managers have been portrayed as guiding the innovators towards organisational goals and introducing structure to organisational life, whereas the innovators are presented as characterized by the striving for freedom in following their creative insight. In this paper we wish to contest this notion and demonstrate how both actor groups navigate this paradoxical tension in their practice. Our results d...