Strategy Innovation Business Essay
“Strategy innovation is the capacity to re-conceive the existing industry model in ways that create new value for customers, wrong-foot competitors, and produce new wealth for all stakeholders.” (Hamel, 1998) This quote is used by Schoenberg to highlight the importance he places on strategy innovation, and the main two drivers of strategic innovation he cites: industry factors and firm factors. However, although there is wide ranging agreement with this view, there are also several dissenting voices amongst the academic community, who often view other factors, and drivers, as being more important to the success of a firm.
One key area where factors outside the firm and industry have a great impact is in the social and environmental pressures facing business, which many companies have become increasingly aware of over the past decade. Many management scholars and consultants have argued that these new demands offer terrific opportunities for progressive organizations, and innovation is one of the primary means by which companies can achieve sustainable growth. (Johnson et al, 2005) This argument is backed up by the view that companies that ignore these pressures do so at their own peril, but the reality is that managers have had considerable difficulty dealing with sustainable development pressures. In particular, their innovation strategies are often inadequate to accommodate the highly complex and uncertain nature of these new demands across the economy and social spectrum as a whole, partly due to an excessive focus on the firm or industry (Hall and Vredenburg, 2003)
Indeed, a strategy that integrates the goals of innovation and sustainable development is needed to ensure sustainable competitive advantage, rather than conventional, market-driven innovations approaches. Sustainable development innovation (SDI) (Hall and Vredenburg, 2003) is in fact driven by science that has
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