To build your capabilities and cast a wider net for ideas, you must figure out which of the three types of innovation strategies you already have — and design your R&D approach accordingly.

As global competition intensifies, it's more important than ever that companies figure out how to innovate if they are going to maintain their edge, or maintain their existence at all. Six Harvard Business School faculty share insights on the best ways to develop creative workers.

Senior managers can apply practical insights from neuroscience to make themselves—and their teams—more creative.

In their new book, The Innovator's DNA, authors Jeff Dyer, Hal Gergersen, and Clayton M. Christensen build on the idea of disruptive innovation to explain how and why the Steve Jobses and Jeff Bezoses of the world are so successful. This excerpt from Chapter One summarizes the five discovery skills that distinguish innovative entrepreneurs and executives from run-of-the-mill managers.

Asking the right questions is key.

The gap between the germ of a disruptive idea and successful commercialization can be wide. Sometimes, managers can feel like they have not developed detailed enough plans to move forward. After a successful ideation session they might say, "How do we know we generated the right idea?" or "There's no way we could, in a day, really develop a robust enough plan to actually spend money on."

And sometimes, managers will go to the other extreme. They will develop an extremely detailed business plan that requires massive investment of dollars and human resources. These plans typically never see the light of day, because senior managers intuitively (and correctly) get squeamish about placing big bets on highly risky plans.

There is another way. Through work with some of our clients--many of them in Asia--we have developed a simple, five-step process that can help companies go from a desire to disrupt to a funded disruptive business plan in less than 100 days.

In this issue of the American Management Association's MWorld's Leader's Edge Scott D. Anthony provides pointers for executives seeking to identify the hidden innovators within their companies and tips for how to develop the next generation of innovation talent.

Business models help support strategic goals, but too often executives don't inject them with the necessary dose of creativity to bring about real success, according to new research by INSEAD professors Karan Girotra and Serguei Netessine.

Success requires going beyond winning once to developing deep capabilities that allow a company to repeatedly disarm disruptive threats and seize new growth opportunities. Borrowing a metaphor from the sports (or geopolitical) world, it requires creating an “Innovation Dynasty” that can, year after year, churn out successful growth businesses.

Chapter 10 of The Innovator’s Solution by Clayton M. Christensen and Michael E. Raynor (Harvard Business School Publishing: 2003) provides a few pointers about how to create an Innovation Dynasty. It suggests that companies should start before they need to, appoint a senior manager to oversee the resource-allocation process, create a team of movers and shapers, and train the troops to spot disruptive ideas.

This article synthesizes that work with Innosight’s in-the-field experience over the past five years to show how companies that create a blueprint for growth, construct an innovation engine, and support that engine with the right structures and processes can build the pillars of an Innovation Dynasty.

IBM Global Business Services, Innosight, and APQC’s research has shown the fallacy in the assumption that successful innovation will come simply by replicating the approach used by other successful innovators. A survey of 90 companies across multiple industries and 14 countries shows that the sourcing, shaping and implementation of ideas at innovative firms tends to conform to a small number of innovation archetypes, which represent a self-reinforcing combination of culture and operations. Google is representative of one of those archetypes, but only one.

Before a company can become the next Apple or Google it must understand its own innovation architecture.

To profit from technology, companies need to change their strategy and begin selling the embodiment of that technology at the ever-shifting point of modular decoupling.

We all know that conventional management structures inhibit day-to-day interaction between departments. The problem shows itself when one department hands a project over to another at the end of a phase: "They can’t make what we’ve designed, and Marketing wants something else anyway!“

People from different departments and disciplines often work to different objectives. In an attempt to overcome the barriers to communication, senior managers may make the mistake of involving themselves at too low a level of detail. Lower-level managers find themselves held up by their lack of authority to make day-to-day decisions or by bureaucratic procedures. To suggest that the solution is "organizational restructuring“ is glib: the cost of the disruption it causes is often too high. The pragmatic solution is to focus attention on the deliverables required at the interfaces between phases of business activity. The interfaces correspond to those points at which big spending or resource decisions have to be made or where teams or functional responsibilities change – for instance, between development and production or between trials and production scale-up.

Interface Management (IM) helps senior managers achieve the results they want, not by telling different functions what to do, but by agreeing on objectives structured in a way that encourages the right involvement of the right groups at the right time.

Choosing which innovative ideas to pursue is often an exercise in guesswork. But by using existing management tools in a new way, executives can effectively gauge an innovation’s potential along two crucial dimensions: Can it withstand market pressures from competitors? And can it deliver more economic value to customers than alternatives?

In this article for Harvard Business Review, Monitor partner Geoff Tuff outlines this distinctive approach: a combination of the Ten Types of Innovation® and Economic Value Estimation (EVE)® tools. The Ten Types of Innovation®, developed by research at Doblin, a member of Monitor Group, classifies the innovation activities organizations pursue. EVE® is a simple framework pioneered by Monitor’s pricing practice that breaks down the economic value of an offer into its component parts and compares this value to a next-best alternative.

This article explains how executives using the Ten Types of Innovation® can take the idea’s “ambient temperature” to assess how well-positioned it is for success. Ideas that innovate in six or more areas—going beyond product innovation to also include business model or customer experience innovation, for example—stand the best chance of success.

After that, EVE®—calculated by dividing the Incremental Economic Value by the Reference Value—can provide a gauge of the innovation’s “heat index,” or how much measurable value it delivers to customers.

It's a 100-segment world. How can you stay a step ahead?

The theory of intelligent memory suggests that companies relying on conventional creativity tools are getting shortchanged.

A major new study involving some 3,500 executives has highlighted the key skills that innovative and creative entrepreneurs need to develop. The six-year-long research into disruptive innovation by INSEAD professor Hal Gregersen, Jeffrey Dyer of Brigham Young University and Clayton Christensen of Harvard, outlines five 'discovery' skills you need. But, says Gregersen, you don’t have to be ‘great in everything.’

Management professor Vijay Govindarajan explains why companies have trouble implementing new ideas — and what they should do about it.

Does innovation depend on "Eureka!" moments, experienced only by a lucky few? Creativity and innovation may seem like moving targets, but building a culture that encourages systemic creativity in an organization is possible, as IESE's Paddy Miller and Azra Brankovic explain.

Matthew E. May introduces a passage on the critical role of a learning focus in innovation from The Other Side of Innovation: Solving the Execution Challenge, by Vijay Govindarajan and Chris Trimble.

I believe that all people are creative, in their own way. Not all people are good at creating lots of really great ideas, nor do they have to be. Innovation success comes not from a single innovator or team, but from a number of people and teams coming together to fill a set of nine innovation roles. These roles must be filled in order for innovation projects to move forward and achieve success. I would argue that most people excel at one or more of these nine innovation roles, and that when organizations put the right people in the right innovation roles, the organization’s speed and capacity for innovation will increase.

The most successful firms have managed to prevail over the years because of their culture of innovation. Surprisingly, the culture of innovation in enterprises has not changed much in the last 100 years. We invite you to read about the fundamentals of this culture and take an assessment to see how your culture of innovation is performing.

Ideacide is a great way to kill creativity. There are many ways to perform it.

Businesses with the best product-development track records stand apart from their less-successful peers in three crucial ways.

To come up with the next iPad or Amazon, the pacesetters of the future need solitary brainstorming time, according to new Wharton research. In a paper titled, "Idea Generation and the Quality of the Best Idea," Wharton professors Christian Terwiesch and Karl Ulrich argue that group dynamics are the enemy of businesses trying to develop one-of-a-kind new products, unique ways to save money or distinctive marketing strategies.