let’s create a new model for career
paths in the innovation function
Gina Colarelli O’Connor
Gina colarelli O’connor, ph.D., associate professor, Marketing, Rensselaer
polytechnic institute ( oconng@rpi.edu)
Despite its maturity, the field of new product development (NPD) has yet to develop into a consistent set of career paths or structures.
For this and other reasons, many companies struggle to find the right formula for innovation success—despite bursts of brilliance or occasional slam dunks. In this article, the author—an expert on breakthrough innovation—describes a new model for this function aimed
at strengthening the career opportunities it offers, while at the same time ensuring companies more consistent innovation success.
Mature companies have struggled with breakthrough innova- tion (BI) forever. The predominant cultures of operational excellence and customer intimacy, so necessary for stable
patterns of revenue growth and highly reliable product delivery
desired by a company’s stakeholders, are antithetical to the world
of risk and uncertainty that naturally accompany the identification,
incubation, and escalation of breakthrough opportunities. So they get
stomped out—over and over again. Yet how necessary is breakthrough
innovation to fuel the company’s future health and escape commodity
traps that plague business units as they ply red oceans1 for short-term
competitive advantages that may rapidly evaporate?
How NPD Practitioners Believe They
Are Perceived Within Their Companies
“It’s difficult for the teams to let us know that the project isn’t
making headway or gaining traction. If it gets killed, they may
very well get the pink slip.”
“If [the company] is on a growth path, then they will get absorbed pretty quickly; if it is not, then the people will not be
safe anywhere.”
“I thought I was being demoted!” (In response to being asked to
lead a BI project, which required fewer people and a lower budget
than the group he was currently managing.)
“Our group was perceived as a “timeout” in your career. Some
internal networks were concerned that moving to (our group) was
a dead end that will hurt your career. With successes and increasing confidence among the upper level managers, that situation is
changing. We are becoming much more favorably viewed.”
“In order to be in this [innovation] business, you have to be happy
to see others take credit for your ideas.”
“Everyone remembers the failures, but no one remembers who
came up with the successes.
“If [project x] makes $10 billion 10 years down the line, no one’s
going to say that our group started that business.”
“I could help launch $4, $5, $6 billion businesses over the next
5 years and I won’t get promoted to VP.”
The earliest approaches—“Skunkworks,” for one
Companies have experimented with many approaches to build
a sustainable BI capability. Skunkworks, external incubators like
Xerox PARC, corporate venture capital funds, and New Ventures
groups that are loosely coupled to the mother organization are
some approaches. None has proven to be both sustainable over
the long term and able to provide a pipeline of real breakthroughs.
Research conducted in the late 1970s and still quoted today indi-
cates that the average life expectancy of a new ventures division
is about 4 years2.
But a new approach is emerging. To be effective, a management
system for innovation must be developed, which is tuned to the
mandate of developing BI that provides new platforms of growth
for the company. This requires creating a group of people (whether
a department or a function) responsible for the BI mandate and its
execution, as well as the right kinds of management techniques
that are tuned to the world of high risk and high uncertainty. It’s
unreasonable to expect BI when we are using controls and pro-cesses that are appropriate for the world of incremental innovation
and operational excellence. Although every organization must
hope that all employees will be innovative thinkers, they cannot
all undertake the BI agenda. If they do, who will deliver on current
customers’ immediate needs?
Some newer approaches are broader
IBM’s Emerging Business Opportunities (EBO) program is well
known. But perhaps many readers do not realize how much effort
and thought went into building an appropriate management system
and infrastructure for the EBO program to succeed. Corning is also
having wonderful success through its Strategic Growth organiza-tion. IBM’s group is located within the Corporate Strategy function
of the company. Corning’s is as well, reporting to the Senior Vice
President of Strategic Growth—akin to a Chief Innovation Officer,
with tight links to the Chief Technology Officer.
Our research program on radical innovation at Rensselaer Poly-technic Institute’s Lally School of Management and Technology
has been examining breakthrough projects as well as companies
trying to build this capability, since 1995. We have learned a tre-
mendous amount and have published numerous papers reporting
our findings in the Journal of Product Innovation Management
(JPIM) over the years, along with two books. 3 IBM and Corning
are companies we’ve studied, along with 25 others: 27 in total.
Among our key findings are that the companies most
