Towards new challenges for innovative management ... - Erima - Estia

opportunities. It is widely noticed that to be a champion in innovation based on disruptive
technologies the enterprise organization must have a high level of evolutionary capability.
II. Conceptual background
The concept of innovation, defined long time ago as “creative destruction” by Schumpeter
(Schumpeter, J, 1934), has become something of a buzzword in the recent literature on
technological change. The “Winds of Creative Destruction” have traditionally moved slowly but
have redefined the way industries conduct business. Schumpeter describes capitalism as an
economy system that finds its competitive strength in innovation. His “Innovative Activity”
(creative destruction) is clearly driven by what today we call disruptive technologies. Abernathy
and Utterback (Abernathy at Al, 1978) emphasize this in describing disruptive technologies as
those that generate entirely new technology-product-market paradigms that in turn create a
new market that initially may be opaque to customers. Opaqueness, they note, constraints
customer enthusiasm for varying established behavioural habits. As we illustrate later, searching
for potential technology-product-market paradigms and clarifying new opportunities for potential
customers are the main challenges of any action in innovation and is the key concept, usually
lacking in R&D collaborative projects, that is applied performed in the practical framework defined
later on.
As regards the method for commercializing disruptive technologies, there is an important
contradiction to be considered: we can focus on the technology-product or on the productmarket
interface. Researchers experienced in disruptive technologies have decided to
emphasize the technology-product area, as we can read in MANCEF (2004). Disruptive
technology based products, like Microsystems and Nanotechnologies, can compete in numerous
market and industrial areas. The efficiencies and performances generated at the technologyproduct
interface establish the competitive winners at the product-market interface. This causes
problems for business professionals, who have been taught to be market-focused (condition
known as marketing myopia). Consequently, the technology pushed versus market pulled
approach is one of the characteristics of technology applications in the “era of ferment”.
To characterize the different type of research actions on innovation we refer to the Oslo
Manual 3 rd Edition (Oslo Manual 2005) that gives two clear references to measure and classify
innovation. It establishes a difference between innovation capabilities and innovation actions. It
defines two ways to improve those capabilities: by action learning from innovation projects, or
through management changes. It also distinguishes innovation actions in product, process,
marketing and organization. As a summary we interpret that, in this conceptual framework, to
innovate means to implement a radically improved new product (service), or process or a new
market paradigm or important changes in the organizational and management culture.
Finally, it is important to remember that Ikerlan has been working since the early 1990s on
enterprise modelling, especially on research into flexibility in the way that industrial enterprises
adapt its organizations to the demands of context change (see some references in Berasategi et
Al 2005, Goenaga et Al 2004 and Zugasti et Al 2003, in collaboration with Muñoz Seca at Al
2003). This entire conceptual framework has materialized in the Flexible Enterprise Conceptual
Model referred to in the introduction (see figure 1), which has proved to be useful in innovation
practice and categorizing three types of flexibility that are defined by the following adjectives:
• Agile. This means adapting current capabilities to meet customer needs. Using, for example,
the capabilities that mass customization options could offer customers.
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