of people and an extended social network to allow
the group to explore the innovation. In the
incubation phase there may be several subjective
reasons for the team to form. The teams would be
small and one member would be in several groups.
A group would contain fulltime equivalent
(FTE) between 1 to 7 people. The number is not
absolute, it depends on the complexity of the
problems. In the incubation phase groups are
unstable and can easy change. During the growing
phase the groups are stable and should grow.
Depending on the complexity of the project the
group is expected to grow to 25 to 75 FTE. This can
happen by merging of project.
The Group-MS contains elements that allow a
project to take action. As such Group-MS makes an
actor emerge. From the model of emerging science
(Latour 1999), four types of actors are identified:
resources, audiences, allies and peers. Resources
(e.g. time, money, human resources, etc.) can help to
make the group act. Audiences can make sure that
the actions of the groups stay relevant. By finding
allies the resources and audiences can become
bundled, this will create leverage. The sustainability
and growth of the group will depend on the available
peers. Peers are colleagues in the incubation phase,
competitors in the growth phase and external expert
in the maturity phase. While allies have
complementary goals and assets, peers have the
same goals and assets.
The Group-MS can be best compared as the
merging of a social networking site with a Human
Resource (HR) system. The social networking will
contain extended profiles to formalize and document
the different actors, which allow the emerging of
social interaction, like knowledge sharing and idea
generation. Not every person will want to be part of
every phase in the project as such the HR part of the
system should simplify transition between groups.
4.3 Business Management System
Just as the Group-MS has its effect on each of the
three phases, so will the Business-MS. This is
evident for the maturity phase, but does require
explanation for the incubation phase. Spread over
the many innovation management cases, one can
recognize the importance of feedback form early
business development. It allows the identification of
emerging markets; elaborate the change needed in
supply and defines the business culture.
Many new businesses use Strengths,
Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats (SWOT)
analyses to explore business opportunities. In
relation to the novelty model, the first two aspects
(SW) are considered internal features, while the last
two (OT) are considered directional features. The
external and learning features are related to action
planning, which follows the SWOT analysis. The
external feature is the action planning that will test
how to serve a market. The action planning will
result in business process to regulate the operations,
which is considered the learning features. By
creating more agile iterations of SWOT analysis and
action planning it is expected to improve the
business development during each phase.
During the incubation phase the iterations will
need to be short, just a few days, and plenty. The
goal is to increase diversity and find unlikely
business opportunities. During the growth phase the
iterations can take weeks, but only few iterations are
created, now the focus is to find advantages over the
competing projects. For the maturity phase there
would hardly be more than one iteration, but it could
take months, now it is directed to possible
acquisitions or spinoff.
The IT-support for the Business-MS will become
the intranet knowledge base. For the A-EIP the
intranet is the externalizing of innovation, as it allow
to spinoff the novelty to better know expert methods,
which only work if there is knowledge. While the
variation in the incubation phase would have created
disconnected bits of assets, the growth phase would
result in standardization of that knowledge and the
maturity phase would align the standard with
particular markets or firm.
4.4 Strategic Management System
Strategy is normally focused on the core business of
a company. However innovation often redefines
strategy and so strategy will need to be discovered
too. Xerox PARC is a classic example. While Xerox
PARC has invented many technologies, it often
failed to create value, so an open strategy is needed
(Chesbrough 2003).
From the analysis about innovation strategy (see
section 2) four key indicators are suggested:
bundles, brands, networks and cultures. The bundles
refer to how the aggregation of business assets, like
resources, result in unique values that need to fit a
particular business strategy. For brands, we can look
at case of near bankruptcy. In such cases companies
get divided, but this was not the case for Apple or
IBM. So the brand has its influence on the strategy.
Imagining an idea is easy, but putting it in
practice will depend on networks. An idea can
become unrealistic because no network can be
INNOV 2011 - Second International Conference on Innovative Developments in ICT
50