Competitive Innovation Management

Competitive Innovation Management"" provides businesses with the keys to becoming more systematically innovative and turning this ability into a lasting competitive advantage. Indeed, innovation is difficult to formalize because many discoveries are simply ""happy accidents"" which are difficult to reproduce. That being said, some companies, like 3M, Apple and Renault, have managed to acquire a sustained competitive edge by implementing the innovation model successfully. All management systems influence a company's ability to innovate. By adapting these systems, companies can improve their performance in the three phases of innovation:

- Generating ideas
At this stage, the point is to generate as many potentially promising ideas as possible. The organization and corporate culture, as well as the HR management policy, play an important role in putting employees in situations likely to stimulate their creativity and allow everyone to express their ideas.

- Selecting investment projects
The company must be able to make decisions rapidly based on the best possible estimate of the potential of a given project. This may require taking initiatives with regard to the number of sources of financing, the system used to motivate
decision makers and the decision-making process itself.

- Running projects.
The company must maximize the chances of each project culminating in an offering that corresponds to a real market,
within a reasonable timeframe and budget. Project management methods must therefore be adapted depending on the
degree of uncertainty of the project.