Publications

01 Sep 2020
News

Ink: The Habit of Innovation

Habit Inside Your Organization. The book, co-authored by Innosight partners Andy Parker and Natalie Painchaud, as well as Paul Cobban of DBS Bank in Singapore, suggests there is a better way. The authors present a roadmap for making View Details

Keywords: Management of Companies and Enterprises; Management of Companies and Enterprises

Article

Scaling Up Analogical Innovation with Crowds and AI

By: Aniket Kittur, Lisa Yu, Tom Hope, Joel Chan, Hila Lifshitz - Assaf, Karni Gilon, Felicia Ng, Robert Kraut and Dafna Shachaf

Analogy—the ability to find and apply deep structural patterns across domains—has been fundamental to human innovation in science and technology. Today there is a growing opportunity to accelerate innovation by moving analogy out of a single person’s mind and... View Details

Keywords: Innovation; Artificial Intelligence; Crowdsourcing; Analogy; Innovation and Invention; Technology; Science

2000
Other Article

Understanding the Drivers of National Innovative Capacity

By: Jeffrey L. Furman, Michael E. Porter and Scott Stern

Motivated by R&D productivity differences across countries, we evaluate the determinants of country-level international patenting. Our framework is built on the concept of national innovative capacity. Our results suggest that (a) patenting is well-characterized... View Details

Keywords: Economics; Growth and Development

As the Alfred D. Chandler Jr. International Visiting Scholar at Harvard Business School in 2023, I had the unique opportunity to delve into the history of the life sciences industry in the Cambridge-Boston area. My research focused on how... View Details

October 27, 2022
Article

4 Types of Innovators Every Organization Needs

By: Andy Wu, Goran Calic and Min Basadur

Every company strives to be innovative, but most are missing key ingredients. How can you identify which ingredients your organization needs — and which employee styles can fill in the gaps? The authors’ research distills four key innovation styles that can lead to... View Details

Keywords: Innovation Leadership; Innovation and Management

May–June 2018
Article

Data Uncertainty in Markov Chains: Application to Cost-Effectiveness Analyses of Medical Innovations

By: Joel Goh, Mohsen Bayati, Stefanos A. Zenios, Sundeep Singh and David Moore

Cost-effectiveness studies of medical innovations often suffer from data inadequacy. When Markov chains are used as a modeling framework for such studies, this data inadequacy can manifest itself as imprecision in the elements of the transition matrix. In this paper,... View Details

Keywords: Markov Chains; Cost Effectiveness; Medical Innovations; Colorectal Cancer; Health Care and Treatment; Cost vs Benefits; Innovation and Invention; Mathematical Methods; Health Industry

23 Oct 2014
News

Transparency in support of innovation

2001
Other Unpublished Work

Clusters of Innovation Initiative: Wichita

By: Michael E. Porter

This study contains a conceptual framework for assessing the competitiveness of regional economies, an analysis of the Wichita region overall, as well as detailed assessments of two representative clusters—aerospace vehicles and defense and plastics. The report... View Details

Keywords: Clusters; Economics; Industry Clusters; Economy; Growth and Development; Industrial Products Industry; Aerospace Industry; Kansas

18 Nov 2016
Working Paper Summaries

Innovation Network

Keywords: by Daron Acemoglu, Ufuk Akcigit, and William Kerr; Technology

Article

Financing Innovation

By: William R. Kerr and Ramana Nanda

We review the recent literature on the financing of innovation, inclusive of large companies and new startups. This research strand has been very active over the past five years, generating important new findings, questioning some long-held beliefs, and creating its... View Details

Keywords: Entrepreneurship; Borrowing and Debt; Innovation and Invention

Article

What Evolution Can Teach Us About Innovation

By: Noubar Afeyan and Gary P. Pisano

Many people believe that the process for achieving breakthrough innovations is chaotic, random, and unmanageable. But that view is flawed, the authors argue. Breakthroughs can be systematically generated using a process modeled on the principles that drive evolution in... View Details

Keywords: Breakthrough Innovation; Variance Generation; Selection Pressure; Emergent Discovery; Innovation and Invention; Value Creation; Innovation Leadership

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Article

Intermediary Functions and the Market for Innovation in Meiji and Taisho Japan

By: Tom Nicholas and Hiroshi Shimizu

Japan experienced a transformational phase of technological development during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. We argue that an important, but so far neglected, factor was a developing market for innovation and a patent attorney system that was... View Details

Keywords: Innovation; Patents; Innovation and Invention; Japan

2010
Working Paper

The Evolution of Science-Based Business: Innovating How We Innovate

By: Gary P. Pisano

Article

Breakthroughs and the 'Long Tail' of Innovation

The largely erroneous perception that breakthroughs are impossible to predict arises from the tendency to focus on just the breakthroughs while ignoring the iterative process of invention and its distribution of outcomes. When all inventions are considered, they... View Details

Keywords: Diversity; Collaborative Innovation and Invention; Independent Innovation and Invention; Innovation and Management; Business Processes; Performance Capacity; Performance Improvement

25 Jul 2013
News

An Engine of Education Innovation

Stig Leschly Photo credit goes here The first time Stig Leschly (MBA 1997 / JD 1998) really sat down to think about what he wanted to do with the rest of his life, he decided to pursue his love of music. He... View Details

Keywords: Elementary and Secondary Schools; Educational Services

Article

On the Division of Profit in Sequential Innovation

By: Jerry R. Green and Suzanne Scotchmer

In markets with sequential innovation, inventors of derivative improvements might undermine the profit of initial innovators through competition. Profit erosion can be mitigated by broadening the first innovator's patent protection and/or by permitting cooperative... View Details

Keywords: Profit; Innovation and Invention

Research Summary

Social Innovation

My intellectual agenda addresses this question: How to innovate to solve the world’s toughest challenges? Out of the earth’s population, about 2 billion can afford good products whereas the remaining 5 billion are poor and therefore are nonconsumers.... View Details

December 2017
Article

Is There a Doctor in the House? Expert Product Users, Organizational Roles, and Innovation

By: Riitta Katila, Sruthi Thatchenkery, Michael Christensen and Stefanos A. Zenios

We explore the impact on innovation that professional end-users of a product have as inventors, executives, and board members in a young firm. In contrast to prior literature, which has emphasized technology roles, we put the spotlight on the executive and governance... View Details

Keywords: Innovation; User Innovation; Healthcare; Innovation and Management; Entrepreneurship; Medical Devices and Supplies Industry