ABSTRACT
The innovation manager at Technology Group A stated clearly the importance of creating new knowledge and innovation for the Business Group; he sharply described innovation as a question of survival. To tell the story from the beginning, Technology Group A, first probably among the Business Groups at the Innovation Park felt that the turn towards commercialization had created a noninnovative, delivery-focused culture that did not allow space or time for generating or, to be more accurate, progressing new ideas. The Business Group saw the
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ideas they had ‘in stock’ – since the times they were doing research as an R&D department – decreasing substantially, and felt that there was ‘a piece of experience they were losing’ in the new commercial order; hence the management decided to support the Business Group and its customers with new knowledge. Soon, they realized that what was missing was an innovation system, which would support with processes and tools all the stages of innovation, from the ideas generation to the intellectual property protection, and most importantly the commercialization of the final product. One of the resource managers states clearly the importance of linking innovation with the market, in a pure rational language of profits:
I: Well . . . ultimately it’s about how providing technological solutions that their customers will buy, obviously, and again innovation is really about taking ideas – preferably from a customer or a market and developing these ideas into products and services that you can sell that to the customer and make money from it.
