New INSEAD book offers breakthrough insights to win global innovation challenge

INSEAD, the leading international business school, today announced the publication of a new book by Emeritus Professor of Strategic Management Yves Doz and senior researcher Keeley Wilson. The text, Managing Global Innovation, gives senior managers and executives a bold framework for meeting innovation challenges posed by a shifting competitive landscape. In particular, the book shows how companies can create strategic advantage by bringing together the best ideas and resources from many spots around the world. It also highlights the critical ways that innovation and the forces driving it have changed in recent years.

Professor Doz, an award-winning scholar who is the Solvay Chaired Professor at INSEAD, says that a shift towards a more globally distributed and integrated approach to innovation is underway. It’s this transformation that is central to his new book, which he describes as a “how-to” guide based on in-depth field research at some 50 global firms and a survey of 186 companies.

“We used to see knowledge created at the centre and then distributed to the periphery,” he says. “What we see today is the opposite: firms are taking innovative opportunities, technologies and ideas from the periphery and then integrating and aggregating this knowledge into innovative products or services in a global innovation network.”

In other words, companies are “learning from the world,” he says.

This approach is a departure from what many firms have done traditionally, which is to “co-locate” their operations, bringing together key people with crucial knowledge and then enabling them to collaborate either in a handful of lead markets or at the company’s headquarters. Today, though, market pressures demand even more from those seeking to compete and innovate on a global scale.

“The range of knowledge needed for global innovation is much wider and more diverse now,” says Keeley Wilson. “To truly profit from globalisation means that you must access diverse and dispersed knowledge and capabilities through global linkages.”

The authors write that firms must manage both greater knowledge complexity and the growing global dispersion of that knowledge. Too often, they argue, companies are unable to develop the innovation management practise needed to work successfully on global projects. As a result, they fail to design a worldwide R&D team that can “master the complexities of distributed innovation,” Doz says.

“Companies make too simple a trade off between complexity and dispersion,” he adds. They can concentrate knowledge in a few places, making certain aspects of management easier. But they do so at a big cost: They lose much of the global knowledge integration potential that could otherwise be gained through an effective global innovation process, such as that articulated by the INSEAD authors around the quality of communication and collaboration

Managing Global Innovation, published by Harvard Business School Press, draws from dozens of real-world examples to show how companies can take the next big leap in thinking about how to organise and manage innovation to achieve sustainable growth and advantage. The book provides a detailed framework that shows:

• the steps to build an optimal innovation network
• how to access new knowledge globally
• best ways to master the communication tools and processes to leverage this complex, dispersed knowledge
• strategies and tactics for managing global projects from inception to delivery, including through collaboration with external partners

“Firms need to learn to see the world as a rich canvas filled with many pockets of knowledge—knowledge about markets, about technologies, and about business models and growth opportunities—all of which can be integrated and leveraged into path-breaking innovation,” says Doz. “It no longer makes sense to innovate with knowledge in one location. Instead, firms must integrate the best ideas from anywhere in the world.”

Managing Global Innovation is intended for senior managers and executives in a variety of settings - from established multinationals to smaller companies looking to internationalise their operations, as well as firms in emerging markets seeking to grow.