Innovation Management - the journey into an exciting world

I started my doctoral journey with my heart set on Technology Management as my area of research. Technology Management is a big part of my professional life. To the chagrin of many who were in my program when asked what was I interested in? The answer was always the same - Technology Management. I started examining Technology Management for a year, but my research was starting to take me into Innovation Management. As a change management agent, I have led change in a variety of organizations hence why this was a natural fit and natural progression.

This was a perfect storm that was beginning to brew because innovation management is intertwined with technology management. I was deeply interested in disruptive innovation prior to my doctoral journey and started thinking hard about that aspect of innovation. Disruptive innovation was always at the fore front as a research area because of things such as CAR T-cell therapy, IoT, Uber, 5G and Airbnb. In my first class of the doctoral program we took a deep dive into theories and conceptual frameworks. I was eager to understand if there were management theories and conceptual frameworks associated with disruptive innovation. This eventually mushroomed into a reality when I discovered several theories and conceptual frameworks which potentially could fit into my area of research.

Last semester Spring of 2019 during my research I stumbled up on the idea of Ambidextrous Leadership. In parallel with this, I was introduced by my mentor from Carnegie-Mellon to Frese, a researcher out of Germany who wrote extensively on change management and ambidextrous organizations. This caught my attention and I kept promoting the idea to my team for us to expand our research into that area. The more I explored this area the more I realized that this is an area that could fit into my Manuscript and Dissertation.

Prior to this, the only thing I knew about being ambidextrous was the ability to use both hands, which my father perfected because he was born left-handed but my grandfather forced him to use his right hand (there were no tools for left-handed folks born in the 1920s and 1930s). I loved to watch my father, Ellis Johnson, write with both hands and swing a cricket bat from both sides. For management research purposes, “ambidexterity” is about being able to explore and exploit simultaneously in the innovation space.

For my Manuscript I knew I wanted to stay close to Disruptive innovation. The research literature took me down a multifaceted path. I explored high technology industries such as digital technology, information technology, and pharma biotechnology. I had delved into a deluge of articles and realized quite quickly that I needed to narrow down my area of focus. I decided to look at the pharma biotech industry. Even though I had over 30 years of experience as a practitioner in pharma biotech I went into my research with no preconceived idea of where my research would take me.

My research consumed many months of poring over empirical data, case studies and conceptual papers including conference papers. I did not look at grey literature at all. This is where my bias showed up because as a positivist, I love the data, the data and the data. I felt like it was too risky to look at grey literature because innovation management is rapidly evolving at the speed of light. I knew going into my research that I would not go back further than the last 5 years to look in depth at the literature for gaps in the research. I started off looking at articles from the past 10 years beginning from 2009 through to 2019. I then narrowed down to the last 4 years to understand the limitations which were presented in research conducted in the area of radical innovation and incremental innovation.

Quite instinctively the area in Innovation Management that piqued my curiosity was Ambidextrous Innovation. This type of innovation is best described or defined as follows:

·         Radical (exploratory) Innovation, as involving “the acquisition of new knowledge and the development of new products for new customers or emerging markets” (Sheng, 2016).

·         Incremental (exploitative)Innovation, as “to enhance the firm's existing knowledge and improve existing products” (Sheng, 2016).

This form of innovation has been researched extensively from an organizational vantage point and a leadership vantage point for the past 20 years. Ultimately the question is: what is the management problem? If I wanted to research this area, I needed to understand the problem before I could conduct good research. As a Lean Six Sigma Black Belt I fundamentally understood the power of a good problem statement.

So here goes my shot at the problem. Problem Statement: “It is a known fact that mergers and acquisitions have grown exponentially in the pharma biotech arena (US Governmental Accountability Office). This has been the case because pharma biotech companies face the daunting task of staying competitive and sustaining their product pipeline while seeking cutting edge technology. Many have been faced with drugs falling off patent and losing market share. Some have become extinct or have been surpassed by their competitors” (Visscher,2006; Hannachi, 2016).

I read over 250 articles over the summer of 2019 and narrowed down to 66 articles for my Manuscript research. I was living, breathing and dreaming about innovation management and ambidextrous innovation. The initial keywords I used were “radical innovation”, “incremental innovation”, and “disruptive innovation”. I will share in my upcoming blog posts where the initial research took me, what other key words I included in my search strings, and about the evolution of my research question.