Management Innovation, Tidd & Bessant Chapter 4
During this chapter we could see a lot of terms being introduced, however, I was familiar with
some of them so for me the ones more relevant were those that I had not read about in previous
study years. To start, the rationalist and incrementalist strategies were very interesting to me, on
the rationalist side it surprised me that they compared the military very linear strategy to SWOT.
In addition, the description of the rationalist strategy: “(i) describe, understand, and analyze the
environment; (ii) determine a course of action in the light of the analysis; and (iii) carry out the
decided course of action” (Tidd & Bessant, 2021); accounts for the quick changes in the market
and the rapid adaptations needed to be done in case of needing immediate actions or strategies to
take place at the moment. It also made me wonder how quick the rationalist strategy would be
since it can not skip steps or simplify them because it has a defined and specific process it needs
to follow.
The incrementalist approach, on the other hand, recognizes that industries are very complex and
changing and that firms will never have complete knowledge of what can go on in the future.
This is the best strategy in my opinion, since firms will always need to be ready and plan their
strategies with a lot of flexibility being ready to change in any moment. Just like what happened
after the pandemic, a lot of companies were not able to keep up with the changes because they
could not change with the speed of the spread of the pandemic and how it affected customer
behavior and their relationships with companies.
I would say the rationalist compared to the incrementalist approach is more utopic in the sense
that in a perfect world, companies would have time to analyze and perfectly predict the world,
market, and any sort of change in their surroundings and then base their decisions on that,
however, as we have seen in the incremental approach, companies only have a limited amount of
knowledge on what the future of the industry is like and any other occurrences that may affect
the already existing course of action that the company has settled to be.
Management Innovation, Tidd & Bessant Chapter 5
High involvement in innovation is highly important. As a worker, it is of the highest importance
to be able to provide insights freely on how the company I am part of can improve, and as a team
lead, I enjoy giving space for ideation and collaborative innovation. I think the fact that
companies attribute efforts of innovation and ideation to only Research and Development teams
is a bad decision, having multiple heads thinking about how there is room for improvement
makes it easier for the company to generate ideas and it is more cost-effective as well. On the
other hand, lower-level employees might experience certain areas of the basis of the business in a
way that maybe a higher-level executive or a mildly isolated team of individuals might
experience.
For me it was very interesting to read about boundary-spanning and how there has been a
discussion on inter-organizational innovation and sharing with competitors to make innovation a
collaborative effort. To me, this is something that causes conflict because for example, we see a
lot of examples and lectures on businesses needing to have a differentiation to be able to survive
and this can be part of the value-creation for stakeholders so how can a company share their
innovation process with other companies that also are competition, will be able to provide a
unique experience to its stakeholders? It would be very interesting to explore examples of
successful companies that have implemented this strategy and that can come up with something
that distinguishes them from whom they shared their innovation process. On the other hand, I do
consider that it is important to collaborate with competitors in sharing the knowledge of the
current industry and possible experiences that they have been encountering lately regarding the
industry and customer behavior since a large amount of information can be compiled from this
and everyone can benefit without having to compromise the uniqueness of each organization.
Tidd, J. and Bessant, J.R. (2020) Managing innovation: Integrating Technological, Market and
Organizational Change. John Wiley & Sons.