Improving the Capacity to Innovate

A Wharton School Conference Designed & Sponsored on Oct. 27, 2006 by the
William & Phyllis Mack Center for Technological Innovation.
Organized by Professors George Day and Karl Ulrich

Pictured here are, left to right: Prof. Karl Ulrich (co-organizer of the event); John Ranieri, DuPont; and Prof. Ian Macmillan. More than 90 people attended our Fall industry partner conference entitled: "Managing Systems of Innovation: Improving the Capacity to Innovate." Systems of Innovation is a major theme of the Mack Center, since corporate growth increasingly relies on innovation, and innovation comes from networks and ecosystems as well as internal R&D. A printed conference report is being prepared, to summarize insights from the event.

Managing Innovation Systems:

Improving the Capacity to Innovate

A Wharton School Conference Designed & Sponsored by the
William & Phyllis Mack Center for Technological Innovation

Organized by Professors George Day and Karl Ulrich

Conference Description & Agenda

Firms have become increasingly proficient at managing individual innovation projects through their separate development funnels. Each successive stage through the funnel provides further information about the commercial and technological feasibility of the project.

Typically, more than 80 percent of projects don't make it all the way through the funnel and into the market. Is there a way to improve the economic efficiency of this process?

These individual projects cannot be managed independently. Each is part of an innovation system that manages dozens or hundreds of projects in the innovation portfolio at one time. What is best for an individual project may be counterproductive for the entire system. Lack of capacity at key points often causes internal traffic jams that delay all projects while seriously stressing the organization. These stresses are compounded when there are competitive pressures to cut the elapsed time through the funnel.

This conference will take a systems approach to these "innovation issues" to ask:

How should the development funnel be shaped? Where should the bottleneck be in the development process?
How much capacity should a firm have at each stage in the process? How can capacity constraints be overcome?
Should a firm maintain "inventories" of partially developed projects or run a "lean" innovation process? What is the best way to organize these approaches?
What are the best long-term and short-term metrics for monitoring the health of an innovation system?

Conference Participants: Participants in this conference will learn from on-going academic work on system performance, and best practice studies of industries ranging from pharmaceuticals to motion pictures, to consumer products and venture capital investments.

Attendees will include senior executives from large corporations involved in technological innovation/emerging technologies, including decision makers responsible for strategic planning, R&D, market scanning, marketing and organization development.