Innovation Management - The online learning center for Managing Innovation.

Higher education is heading for disruption. In the new book The Innovative University: Changing the DNA of Higher Education From the Inside Out, Clayton Christensen and Henry Eyring explore why this is inevitable and what traditional universities and colleges can do about it. Professor Bill Fischer, himself an avid believer in disruption, reviews this book covering an extremely timely subject.

Are you someone who is always coming up with great ideas? If not, do you think it’s possible to learn and train to become a better idea worker? IMD Professor Bill Fischer believes you can.

When does innovation begin? Is it at the moment of inception, or at the moment of adoption, or at the moment when the new innovation really displaces the old? An interesting question, especially as the implications of each milestone are fundamentally different, yet each is a profound accomplishment in their own right. British historian David Edgerton has argued in his book The Shock of the Old for a focus on something between adoption and dominance; and reliance upon what he calls “use-centered history” to mark the real impact of new innovations.

Seldom has a single technological innovation affected so many markets at once – the music industry, hardware vendors, the labor market, artists and consumers themselves. This is the story of how the iPod was made. In a quest to make music more portable, designers and engineers at Apple got together to create the iPod. Steve Jobs, in his quintessential style, maneuvered through established, entrenched industry interests to finally price music in a way that addressed all stakeholders. An idea, however brilliant and singular, reaches perfection when many heads work together. The iPod story is as much a lesson in team collaboration as it is in decisive leadership.

In the face of increasing shifts in the world economy, and particularly increased competition across markets and company offerings, it would appear that one of the latest trends in instinctive strategic advice for companies is to become “more innovative!” Yet being more innovative is not necessarily easy. Learn more in this article by IMD professor Bill Fischer.