MIT Sloan Management Review Article on The Five Stages of Successful Innovation

Serendipity is not a strategy, yet that’s the extent of most companies’ innovation planning. The importance of innovation to a company’s future is unquestionable. Then why do so few companies have a process for it? The authors of a September 2006 working paper, Crafting Organizational Innovation Processes, address that question. Their underlying research comprised semi-structured interviews conducted with senior research and development, marketing and product management executives from more than 30 U.S. and European companies in several distinct industries, supplemented with data from annual reports.

The paper identifies five discrete and essential stages of successful innovation.