The human side of radical innovation

Radical innovation requires organizations to move into unknown territory and experiment with new processes that largely elude systemization. In this paper we report on a 6-year longitudinal study of 12 radical innovation (RI) projects in 10 large established US based firms. In actuality, there are a number of organizational factors that leverage the human side of making radical innovation happen that, if viewed systematically, could be utilized more broadly for greater radical innovation success. We report on gaps and mismatches that emerged in the sample as well regarding the expectation for radical innovation to happen and the mechanisms by which people are incented to do so. We link our observations to the evolving dynamic capabilities literature as it is currently being extended into high velocity domains. (C) 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.