Design thinking in responding to disruptive innovation: A case study

How can the design thinking approach assist firms in developing response strategies to momentum-gaining disruptive innovations, along the lines of effectively exploiting established technologies and corresponding products/services? Such exploitative response strategies, implying successfully strengthening and leveraging the disrupted firm’s existing technology without embracing the disruptive elements, have been, to a large extent, overlooked in the disruptive innovations literature. Using an inductive analysis of a critical case (a major cork stopper producer), the current study aims at developing a systematic understanding of exploitative strategic options and the role of design thinking in enabling them. The findings shed light on the effectiveness of the design thinking mindset to respond to disruptive innovations. In addition, we present evidence that a design thinking method can be successfully applied to process innovation. Finally, we demonstrate that to achieve a radical innovation based on design thinking principles, the establishment of design discourse is required

Evaluation of Innovation Strategies to Achieve Process Innovation in the Oil Industry

This dissertation includes three essays exploring the development of technical process innovations in the oil industry. Currently, the industry is facing a fast-changing technological environment, calling for innovations addressing its environmental, social and financial challenges. This context is interesting because the study of both the oil industry, as a process- and resource-oriented industry, and of technical process innovations has been lacking in the business literatures. The first essay studied a new entrant to the Canadian oil industry that aimed to develop a disruptive process innovation. By studying this case, I identified some of the challenges that the firm faced through developing the innovation, including a) a lack of resources, b) a vertical leadership style, c) tension between the investors` expectation to gain quick profit and the lengthy process of technology development, and d) internal collaboration. The study suggests that to address these barriers, new entrant firms may: 1) utilize inter-firm collaboration, 2) develop intra-firm collaboration, 3) develop non-vertical leadership skills, and 4) secure long-term investments. The second essay, a multiple case study of innovation intermediaries in the Canadian oil industry, followed the finding of the first essay on collaboration. In this essay, I extended the open innovation model both theoretically and practically by identifying the boundary conditions that motivate firms and the approaches that have been implemented in practice in applying this model. The second essay suggests that institutional forces (e.g., normative and coercive forces) are the primary motivators for adopting open innovation in response to the social and environmental concerns faced by the oil industry. In addition, by building on meta-organizations’ taxonomy, the study demonstrates that establishing not-for-profit innovation intermediaries was necessary to govern adoption of open innovation in this industry. The third essay explored one of the most successful models of such innovation intermediary and discusses its successes and failures. The conceptual model that was derived from the findings combines strategic bridging organisational concepts with open innovation model ideas to help us understand how an innovative technologies network at the industry level is built