Torneos de innovación

Innovation Tournaments: Creating and Selecting Exceptional Opportunities

Christian Terwiesch Karl T. Ulrich The Wharton School

This book will be published in May 2009 by Harvard Business Press.

CONTENTS Preface Introduction 1. Tournaments 101 2. Generating Opportunities Internally 3. Sensing Opportunities Externally 4. Screening Opportunities 5. Pulling Opportunities from Strategy 6.Analyzing Near-Horizon Opportunities 7. Forming Opportunity Portfolios 8. Managing Far-Horizon Opportunities 9. Structuring the Funnel 10. Organizing and Governing Innovation Getting Started Notes Bibliography Index Acknowledgments About the Authors

P-1 Preface Innovation is often compared to lightning or flying sparks—spontaneous and uncontrollable. While randomness and serendipity clearly playa role in innovation, and no single analytical tool can innovate for you, we believe that the innovation process can be managed effectively by using a set of scientific principles and analytical tools. This book is a guide to the key scientific principles that underlie successful innovation. We aspire to provide solid frameworks and methods for mastering innovation, supported by logic andempirical evidence. Our motivation for this approach to innovation arises from our professional backgrounds. We have invented products, started companies, and helped hundreds of companies innovate more effectively. But in what sometimes feels like a double life, we have also taught about 10,000 MBA students about process flows, bottlenecks, and quality improvement processes. In a sense we have beeninnovators trapped in the bodies of operations management professors. This book harmonizes our two passions—innovation and process management. Our goal is to push readers to apply the rigorous approaches they bring to operations, marketing, and finance to the management of innovation. Our interest in developing a rigorous approach to innovation goes back to our research in the pharmaceutical industry.Several years ago we began collaborating with Merck & Co. and were struck by the high degree of structure in the drug discovery process. We had little understanding of the underlying medicine, chemistry, and biology, but that turned out to be a blessing. Our ignorance forced us to view Merck’s innovation activities abstractly as a process, with molecular compounds characterized only as“opportunities” flowing through a sequence of innovation phases. As we worked with Merck to improve its process we became convinced that innovation in many sectors, even intrinsically creative ones like movies and music, could be approached with the process view. The notion of an innovation process presents an apparent contradiction: innovation is fundamentally concerned with creating new things, but a processdoes the same things repeatedly. This contradiction is resolved by viewing the process at the right level of abstraction. For most of this book, we will focus on the concept of an opportunity. In pharmaceuticals, the opportunity is a newly discovered chemical compound. In Hollywood, it’s the storyline for a movie. For a consumer products company, it might be a newly expressed customer need,perhaps in response to new information about health. For a venture capital firm, it’s a business plan submitted by a startup. Within an organization, each opportunity differs in terms of the specific need addressed or solution deployed, but a set of standard actions can apply to managing these opportunities within the innovation process. Movie scripts may differ in their characters and plots, but theprocess of creating a movie can be broken down into a standardized sequence of innovation phases—script development, pre-production, production, and so forth. Indeed when viewed as a process for managing a collection of opportunities, innovation looks very similar across sectors, whether movies, pharmaceuticals, consumer goods, or venture capital. Don’t misread us. We are not arguing for a...