Model for innovation management by companies based on corporate entrepreneurship

Corporate accelerators are on the rise and established companies from a diverse set of industries and regions have set up such startup support programs to predominantly pursue strategic goals. The purpose of this study is to shed light on the benefits of corporate accelerators from a corporate perspective and that of the participating startups. In order to do so, this in-depth single-site case study investigates the SAP Industry 4.0 Startup Program building upon an inductive research design with explorative nature. The authors qualitatively examine a newly established corporate accelerator program of one of the world’s largest enterprise software companies and provide valuable insights for both practitioners and scholars engaged in corporate accelerators. The benefits for startups participating in corporate accelerator programs can be linked to operational go-to-market acceleration in regards to product development, sales acceleration, as well as skill and knowledge development. Moreover, the startups receive benefits linked to strategic business development acceleration in the areas of strategy and business model improvements, pitching, financing, and strategic partner development. At the same time, corporate accelerators overall aim to increase the competitiveness of established companies running such programs by developing a product ecosystem and the brand, infusing startup culture into the organization and developing customer relationships.

In this paper, the authors analyze global innovation rankings as provided by Strategy& over the last 7 years. They first explore the raw ranks and report variations in year-over-year (YOY) ranks for top ten ranking companies. The normalized innovation ranks are then used to calculate the Innovation Power (inP) to assess if these companies maintained or improved their ranks over time. An interesting classification of innovations for the top 10 emerges from this analysis. The constant top innovators were Apple and Google. The rising innovators were Tesla, 3M and Facebook. Other classifications are discussed. The authors propose a non-statistical predictive model, which is reminiscent of a kinematic model using a novel concept of Innovation Momentum (inM) and predict that for 2017, Apple and Google will hold their first and second place, followed by Amazon, Samsung and Tesla. Facebook is also expected to rise in its rank. Companies that reach out and serve end-user needs with service innovations appear rising in ranks, far more than R&D intensive patent filing innovators in these ranks. Tesla is an interesting top ranker to watch. There are implications for software focused companies gaining importance given their flexibility over hardware dominant ones. Some bottom innovators are further declining. Although the rankings are perception-based, there is a pattern that implies it is not random or merely subjective. The analysis highlights the need for leaders and consultants to put in perspective the complex management problem of measuring innovation.

Innovations play an important role in achieving competitiveness and long-term economic growth at all levels of the economic hierarchy. More recently, the role of sustainability-oriented innovation in achieving economic growth has become equally important. However, there is a scientific debate about the possibility of effective commercialization of sustainability-oriented innovations. The existence of such scientific debate, as well as the absence of citation-based systematic literature reviews, became a prerequisite for conducting a comparative literature review of research on the effective commercialization of conventional and sustainability-oriented innovations. The purpose of the study is to conduct a comparative review and analysis of research on the commercialization efficiency of conventional and sustainability-oriented innovations. The analysis was conducted on the basis of a citation-based systematic literature review method. The results show that sustainable innovation research is more focused on the relationship between commercialization and firm performance. In the field of conventional innovations, research trends have shifted from studying the impact of technology transfer office (TTO) size, staffing, compensation practices to how strategic factors affect the efficiency of commercialization. In the area of sustainability-oriented innovation, the issues of the strategic orientation impact cause the most sustained interest, while managerial concerns and the stringency of environmental regulations have been actively explored in the past few years. It was revealed that the commercialization efficiency of sustainability-oriented innovations is characterized by so called sustainability-oriented criteria. A distinctive output criterion for commercialization efficiency of sustainability-oriented innovation is the improvement of the firm’s image. In addition, content analysis identified possible research directions to be investigated.