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Three forms of business innovation are presented, inspired by the tenets of Mahatma Gandhi. They are: changing organizational capabilities, sourcing or creating new capabilities, and disrupting conventional business models. Illustrations for these methods are also included.

The authors promote an inside-out approach to evaluating internal projects. Ideas include adopting a supplier/customer perspective, allowing others to help create nonstrategic initiatives, and maintaining relations with industry associations, collaborators, and clients.

The five discovery skills are: associating, questioning, observing, experimenting, and networking. These skills maximize critical thinking, foster new perspectives, and open up new possibilities.

Guidelines are presented to assist companies in developing successful test and learn functionality. Key components are developing and refining a hypothesis, securing adequate managerial training to conduct the experiment, and setting up processes for learning capture.

Tips for fostering creativity within the corporate environment include opening up to diverse perspectives, encouraging collaboration, drawing on ideas from all employee levels, providing intellectual challenges, and accepting failure and the resultant learning it offers.

The article delineates and discusses the external sourcing continuum, a key to fostering and managing business innovation and creativity. The continuum identifies low and high risk along a measurement of raw ideas, market-ready ideas, and market-ready products/services. It also identifies the roles of innovation intermediaries.

The author raises the concern that more stringent Internet security may hamper generative creativity, hindering progress and innovation. Tips on preserving creativity while maintaining minimal security are identified and discussed.

Using principal component analysis, the relative position of European Union member states with respect to industrial innovation in general and manufacturing sector innovation in particular are analyzed.

With reference to a comparative study on firms in United Kingdom, France, Spain and Germany, the interrelationship between a firm's investment in research and development projects, its innovations and its productivity performance is analyzed.

The article identifies funding, players, policy, technology, customers, and accountability as the primary factors that can foster or hinder innovation. These are discussed within the context of health care delivery in the United States. Suggestions for public policy include market-based pricing and universal coverage.

Self-direction was found to be a significant antecedent for workplace creativity among Egyptian employees, rather than conformity or power. Organizational context positively influenced workplace creativity if perceived to be nurturing, but data did not support the hypothesis that a hierarchical and controlling environment impedes creativity.

Guidelines are offered for striking a balance between product innovation, customer satisfaction, and profitability. Gauging business complexity involves number of offerings, sales volume, modularity, manufacturing, services, and retail.

Multiple contributors share thoughts, experiences, and practices to enhance corporate growth and management. Subjects include adopting new technologies, surmounting psychological barriers, capitalizing on uncertainty, examining risk management, and exploring intellectual property rights.

The article examines the concept of productive friction, challenges and difficulties that present opportunities to improve or innovate businesses. Conditions that make innovation from conflict possible include a shared concept of what needs to be accomplished, aggressive performance targets, recruitment of appropriate participants, and being open to hybrid solutions.

A new theoretical explanation is provided for the empirical observation that large firms usually adopt sooner, although there are notable exceptions. The analysis focuses on the adoption of an innovation of uncertain profitability by a large firm with two plants and a small firm with one. Marginal production costs are increasing in each plant, and economies of multiplant operation are possible. These have conflicting effects on the incentive to adopt. The large firm benefits more from adopting a success. However, if an adopter must shut down a plant to learn about the innovation, the loss of multiplant economies reduces the large firm's incentive to adopt. Absent multiplant economies, the large firm is more likely to lead a diffusion because its greater return from a success dominates. However, the small firm is more likely to lead a diffusion if there are multiplant economies and the large firm's learning cost disadvantage dominates., 1. Introduction One empirical regularity associated with the adoption of new technology is that large firms tend to adopt sooner than small firms (e.g., see Davies 1979; Mansfield 1968; Mansfield [...]

A study with a sample of Taiwanese employees was conducted to examine identity and creative action in the workplace by integrating role identity theory. The results showed that creative role identity was predicted by perceived coworker creativity expectations, self-views of creative behaviors, and high levels of exposure to the U.S culture.

Byline: Rainer Walz Regulation is especially important for infrastructure systems (such as wind energy), which are characterised by a triple regulation challenge in the areas of R&D spillovers, environmental protection, and access to monopolistic bottlenecks. A heterodox approach is used to study the effects of regulation, which starts from a system of innovation and distinguishes different innovation functions. These functions are used as a bridge to incorporate the various paradigms of the effects of environmental and natural monopoly regulation explicitly into the analysis. Case studies for Germany and the USA show that despite an early start, the US innovation system has not worked sufficiently until now. In contrast, regulations in Germany provided for a high functionality of the innovation system wind power, which enabled Germany to catch up internationally. The importance of instrument design highlights that the analysis of the interaction between regulation and innovation must be performed on a rather detailed level.

Strategy-driven traits were found to raise innovative performance in small to medium-sized companies. These include learning and market orientation. Competition-related traits, such as barriers to entry and industry concentration, were found to significantly affect innovative activity. Data are drawn from 150 Greek manufacturing firms.

An inclusive-paradigm model is presented for examining the contrast between innovation and marketing orientations. Four specifically defined factors are identified that correspond to model archetypes, which are then linked to company performance.

Byline: Cornelius Herstatt, Birgit Verworn, Akio Nagahira In this paper, we report on the results of an exploratory study including 28 innovation projects carried out by 14 German and 13 Japanese companies to reduce project uncertainty. In all cases, we observed a range of activities to reduce project specific uncertainties and revealed differences in the practice of innovation management in both the German and Japanese companies. The focus of our research was the so-called 'fuzzy front end', activities and typical deliverables in the innovation process, which might be affected by front end management practice. Overall, in the case of the German as well as the Japanese projects, the uncertainties affected by the market or technology could successfully be reduced during the 'fuzzy front end' and the majority of projects achieved their objectives and efficiency targets. Nevertheless, our study revealed differences in the way such uncertainties were reduced by the companies in Japan and Germany.

The three paths suggested are discovery, or identifying and creating marketplace opportunities; incubation, or experimenting with new businesses to produce new value; and acceleration, or supporting new business while it strengthens. Employee skills at various levels are discussed for each path.

The article links outsourcing with business creativity and corporate growth.

The article presents guidelines for facilitating business innovation within an organization through the management training process. The implementation of benefits from such training relies on an organization's receptiveness and adaptability to the new perspectives the manager brings back.

Research indicates that investors are skittish about backing a business that proposes significant changes to its product or service status quo.

Paul Ormerod, theoretical economist, defends the position that failure is necessary for success, emphasizing the roles of innovation and exploration over strategic planning.

Deborah Wince-Smith identifies transparency in both governance and measuring intangibles as the primary factor driving innovation in a highly-regulated corporate environment.

The article assesses the business creativity climate in America as opposed to other locations around the world and finds that it is lacking, as competition for talent is increasing.