Discipline of Innovation Summary

Peter Drucker, in his article of HBS discusses the sources and types of innovation and analyzes through examples where different types of innovations stand. Firstly he asks the question whether innovation is hard work or as believed by many inspiration. He argues that innovation is mostly the resuly of hard, disciplined work as opposed to inspiration. Then he goes on to discuss the profile of innovative organizations and their managers. He thinks that establishing roles and processes, setting goals and measures and reviewing progress step by step in innovation is on end where as hiring right people and getting out of their way is the other. He concludes that innovation is an outcome of an organizational/managerial profile which is in the middle of the these two ends. He discusses that having an entrepreneurial personality is not necessary for innovation to occur; whereas commitment to systematic practice of innovation is required.
In the rest of the article Drucker defines and gives concrete examples from 20th century on the sources of innovation. According to him innovation stems either from inside the company or industry or outside of them. The author mentions 4 different sources from inside the company: Unexpected occurences, incongruities, process needs and change in industry or market. He argues that unexpected success or failıure stories are good sources of innovation. As an example he gives the redesignation of IBM accounting machine as a payroll machime for libraries. For the incongruity example Drucker gives minimills and enzyme developed by Alcon labs. Linotype and newspaper advertising are given as examples of process needs source of innovation. Sprint is given as an example from telecommunications on change in industry or market. Next the authore goes on to discuss sources of innovation from outside the company or industry. He seperates these sources into 3 categories. Firstly, he mentions demographic changes. As an example he gives the japanese