Caries dental

This study has been performed as one part of a research project called the Discontinuous Innovation Project (DIP). Within the scope of this work, empirical data have been gathered from three Swedish firms. They come from the personal care industry (more on this in study 3), the mechanical engineering industry and video surveillance.

Initially, the study was quite broad and exploratory in order to look for interesting empirical observations that could be further investigated. The main purpose was to explore how firms are working with challenges related to discontinuous innovation and more specifically to disruptive innovation. Open-ended, semi-structured interviews were conducted at these firms, in several cases together with one or two other researchers22. The questions concerned such issues as idea management and discontinuous innovation, selection mechanisms and business development. This broad scope enabled the researchers to obtain insights which helped them to identify issues of further interest. Hence, the study was largely abductive, where the initial round of interviews generated knowledge that could be followed up with more detailed investigations later on. The interviewees all had in common that they had been working on some projects which were of a more discontinuous nature compared to the established business. Additionally, some technology-specific documents were obtained under secrecy. In total, three workshops were also held together with these and other firms where key findings were reported, validated and discussed in further detail.

A formal relationship has been maintained with two of these companies during 2007-2009. These relationships enabled extensive access to information that it would have been difficult to access otherwise. Moreover, innovation audits were performed at these two firms during 2007 by the Center for Business Innovation, which the author belongs to. Within the scope of these two audits, interviews were conducted with managers and directors who had positions that were related to the innovation process. The interviews were semi-structured, asking the

       22 _{Jennie Björk and Mats Magnusson.}

respondents about such issues as the company’s current processes, its organization, its idea management system and innovation strategy. In addition to this, scorecards regarding the creative climate and the innovation work in general were sent out on a broader scale. While this work was performed by a team of researchers and industry partners and did not directly generate any data that were used in the papers, it still served as vital background information. Furthermore, it helped the author to gain more practical insights into innovation work at companies, which in turn made it easier to understand what kinds of challenges were both industrially and theoretically relevant. This partnership also enabled access to databases, internal presentations, follow-up discussions and key employees. Working together with firms over a longer period of time also creates an important contextual understanding of present challenges and ways of working.

During this first round of data collection, four interviews were conducted at each firm. At the firm in the mechanical engineering industry, the respondents came primarily from the concept development department. The main task for these people is to test and develop ideas into concepts, which in turn can result in new products. The interviews lasted for about one hour. Each interview concerned one discontinuous product innovation, how it had been developed and the main problems which had been encountered.

Similar issues were addressed at the second firm, where four interviews of approximately 90 minutes were performed. The company is present in the video surveillance industry and is driving the ongoing shift from analog CCTV to digital, IP-based video surveillance. Some of the interviewees were working on technological issues, others were managers of R&D and one of the co-founders of the company was also interviewed. The questions concerned how the firm is working with new ideas which lie beyond the scope of its current business. The fact that this technological shift was disruptive in many respects triggered further interest in the company and the industry and it was therefore revisited in the fifth study.

Case descriptions were written based upon this information after a round of discussions with the other two researchers participating in the study. The descriptions were related to existing literature on discontinuous innovation and it was concluded that this stream had largely overlooked the difficulties encountered by firms which try to launch innovations that are discontinuous for the customer, i.e. incompatible with existing processes and practices or require a significant change in firm behavior.

The study went into further detail at the firm operating in the personal care industry, looking at how idea management systems can be designed in order to capture, generate and develop both discontinuous and steady-state innovation ideas. This issue was considered of particular interest at that time since it has been stated in the literature that discontinuous and disruptive innovations need to be treated differently, but that knowledge is needed regarding how such systems can be designed. The studied firm was targeted since it had a long experience of idea management and had tried to change its system in order to handle both minor and more

discontinuous initiatives. In total, more than 30 interviews were performed. Many of these interviews were conducted together with other researchers within the scope of the previously mentioned innovation audit. This work provided important background information but also offered an opportunity to ask different people at the firm how the idea management system worked in practice. People who had a relation to the idea management system were targeted, for instance R&D managers, contributors to the system and the persons who were in charge of it and had designed the system. The interviews were semi-structured and focused explicitly on the idea management system, how it works, its advantages and drawbacks and how it has changed over time. Follow-up interviews were also conducted in order to make sure that the results were correct. These, in combination with key statistics from the firm’s idea database where descriptions of ideas within the company are stored, have increased the validity of the findings.

One consequence of a broad and exploratory approach when undertaking a study is that its final results are beyond the original objective. This was the case with some parts of the described study and therefore, it did not directly lead to any corresponding paper in this dissertation. However, it still helped to identify some areas of interest which have been further addressed in other studies like the third and fifth ones. The aforementioned idea management case resulted in a paper; see Sandström and Björk (2010) for further information. This article was not included since in the end, it did not really fit into the overall research objectives of the dissertation.