There’s no point denying the fact that even the established firms in the industry lack the ability to come up with breakthrough innovations, and it is not just and opinion by most of the industry experts, rather concrete statements. But was it so even a century back? One of the renowned economist of the 20th century, Joseph Schumpeter, who is known for heralding the role of innovation in the evolution of the society, comments that all these established firms were positioned in the best of their ways along with sufficient resource that would not hinder their innovation. And this opinion was strongly agreed by most of the management thinkers in the industry.
Later it was the combination of the Internet and even the venture capital which actually summed up in changing the way these business leaders started thinking. There was a completely new source of innovation that could break through the toughest of the challenges that high growth startup companies often faced. Since most of these startup companies had the appetites of taking high risks and returns, with no burden of legacy to maintain a streamlined expectation, these agile young businesses took up a series of innovation strategy programs, all of which did not prove to be fruitful in the very first attempt. But that did not stop them from lingering with the process. They experimented, went through some of the toughest times, but finally came up with an award-winning innovation model that could lead them and show them the path of success.
Now the big question in this paraphernalia of challenges is, whether it is possible that these large established companies would excel in both the parts of the innovation challenge which included not only playing the quintessential role of being the hotbeds to create such innovation programs, and take the advantages out of it as well. However, experts believe that this is something not impossible, but will definitely require different environment within the enterprises, and a more conducive bottom up innovation strategy that could break through the toughest of the nuts.
There is completely a different and a new important dimension along which the business innovations differ. While some of them come from the top down, get conceived in the upper ranks of a particular organization and translated into multiple layers of execution, the rest percolate right from the bottom up and emerge as the strongest. Once combined, these two dimensions will actually show up the four possible innovations that exist in the market.
Firstly there’s the incremental innovation that is being driven right from the top where all the updates and extensions are being planned to ensure the continuation of the process in the long term perspective. Next, there’s the incremental innovation which is being driven from the bottom, which is actually being termed as emergent improvements. Then there are the strategic bets and strategic discoveries which actually make it possible for the breakthrough innovations to start at the bottom.
Whether all of these will be effective enough depends on the devices used by the companies, since they have already proved the test of time and there’s no further questioning them.
Daryl Green 
Barbara Ratliff