Teaching

Resources
and
Instructors’
Guidelines
Chapter 2: Digital is different?
Chapter 2: • In the following PowerPoint slides you will find the
Digital is key headings from CHAPTER 2 together with the
main illustrations, tables, etc.
different?
•There are also slides summarizing the key messages
in bullet-point fashion, and a wide range of activities
which you can use to help students explore around
these themes.

•Finally there are some reflection questions which

can be used as the basis for discussion or
assignments.
 Learning Objectives

By the end of this chapter

The nature and origins of
you will have an
digital innovation
understanding of:

The case for seeing it as a The role it can play in

transformative technology innovation management by
with pervasive impacts providing powerful new tools
across all sectors to support the process

The wider management

implications, especially in
learning to operate at a
system level
Core themes
and material
from the
book
 • ….the suite of technologies
around the creation or
capture, storage/retrieval,
processing and
Digital communication of
innovation… information and their
combination into high level
systems with emergent
properties.
Simplified model of digital
innovation
Is it new?
Is it revolutionary?
  
• Low cost leading to widespread application
potential
• Common language – digital code – enabling
communication and interoperability of software
• Fast easy communication - connectivity was the
barrier back in the 1980s, even with advanced
protocols like ISDN (Integrated Services Digital
Key features Network) and similar.
of digital • Increasing wireless connection potential
• Low cost enables intelligent functionality to be
technologies built into the simples of devices and then
connected into systems – the ‘internet of things’
• Learning via machine (artificial intelligence)
• Potential to collect and work with Big Data –
massive increases in the volume, variety and
velocity of collection allows for pattern
recognition and exploiting of network-level effects
What does it mean for innovation
management?
 The new digital toolkit

Stage in Digital tools

innovation  
process
Search Broadcast search / crowdsourcing
Cross-sector pattern matching
Patent mining
Innovation contests
Innovation markets
User communities
Netnography
Internal collaboration platforms
 
 The new digital toolkit

Implement Simulation and prototyping tools – e.g. 3D

printing
Collaboration platforms
Co-creation communities
Virtual teams
AI/machine learning
 
 
 The new digital toolkit

Select Idea markets

Voting via collaboration platforms
Crowdfunding
Decision support tools
Machine learning/artificial intelligence (AI) applied as
decision tool
Simulation and prototyping to extend the exploration
phase at low cost
 
 
 The new digital toolkit

Capture Networking and viral marketing to

value accelerate diffusion
Platform models to concentrate and
deploy knowledge
Ecosystem construction
AI/machine learning
 
 Front-end innovation tools
• Innovation contests and crowdsourcing
solutions
• Innovation markets
• Innovation communities
• Innovation toolkits
• Innovation laboratories, makerspaces,
collective co-creation
 • Finding ideas – crowdsourcing,
broadcast search
• Selecting ideas – idea markets,
comments and collaboration
Collaborative • Implementing ideas – on and
innovation offline support for development
platforms and collaboration
• Targeting innovation – via
campaigns and missions
• Knowledge management –
capture, sharing, recombination
Digital tools across the innovation process
 • Systems level thinking
Driving new • Platform thinking
approaches
to innovation
• Changing role of knowledge
management • Skills and capabilities
• Responsible innovation
 In this chapter we have explored the potential
of digital innovation, defined as the suite of
technologies around the creation or capture,
storage/retrieval, processing and
communication of information and their
combination into high level systems with
emergent properties.

We have seen that although not new the

momentum behind this technological wave
has been building and has reached a maturity
Summary in development of key components and
infrastructure that now enables system level
solutions to be widely available across all
spheres of social and economic activity

Such a trend and the accompanying emergent

properties of such systems qualify digital
innovation for being considered as
transformative, having many characteristics
associated with long waves of economic and
social change
 Digital innovation has two key implications for
innovation management. First in the outputs of
the innovation system; there is enormous scope
for applying the technology and the challenge is
to explore innovation space as effectively as
possible to find and exploit these opportunities.
At the same time the take-up of the
technologies is limited by the availability of
skills, structures and business models to enable
them and so building these into digital
innovation strategies will be important.

Summary
In terms of its implications for the process of
innovation itself digital innovation offers a wide
range of new and improved tools with which to
work right across the process. Once again this
has skills and capability building implications
 There are also new challenges
for innovation management
emerging from the need to learn
to operate at system level, co-
ordinating and orchestrating the
efforts of multiple actors and
stakeholders in wider innovation
ecosystems

Summary
The transformative potential of
digital innovation raises
questions about the purposes
and consequences of such a
trajectory and this underlines
the need for a ‘responsible
innovation’ approach
 Videos
There are several videos which can help explore and
present the key themes of the chapter:
• David Simoes Brown of 100% Open talking about
the challenges of working in open innovation
with especial emphasis on digital channels
• Catharina van Delden talking about her company
Innosabi which has grown to be a successful
business in the field of online community
development to support agile innovation
• Michael Bartl
talking about using digital tools for market resear
ch
• Pedro Oliveira talking about Patient Innovation, a
healthcare innovation platform
• Francisco Pinheiro, Strategic Innovation Manager
with Atos
talking about the challenges of getting innovative
ideas from employees via internal online
platforms in the company
 • There are several podcasts
and blogs picking up key
themes around managing
innovation as a process and
Blogs and some of the key variables:
• Birth of the internet
podcasts
• An innovation birthday party

• Alan Brown also has an

excellent blog on digital inno
vation here
 There are several case studies which highlight key
themes in the chapter, including:

• Lufthansa Systems and Liberty Global showing

how they use collaboration platforms to search
for ideas across the organization
• Procter & Gamble’s ‘connect and develop’ search
approach
• Cash programming in humanitarian innovation
showing the massive potential for digital
Cases •
approaches
Hella, showing how the move into digital
technologies in the 1980s transformed the
fortunes of the business
• Lego, Threadless, Zara showing how digital
techniques enabled major new innovation
directions
• Report on ‘open collective innovation’
• Report on opening up healthcare innovation
• Cybercrime report
 • There is a rich variety of
tools to help with
innovation and many of
these have been
significantly upgraded
Tools through the use of digital
approaches. You can
find a full list here.
 • You can find an interactive e
-book and tool here
which explores the use of
Tools online collaboration
platforms to enhance
innovation within and
between organizations
 • There are a variety of
activities (for both groups
Activities and individuals and for
online as well as offline
work. These include:
 • Look at an organization
with which you are familiar
or pick one of the cases on
the website. How far has
Activities (or might) digital
technology change the
business and how might
this affect the way
innovation is managed?
 • Look at the high
involvement maturity
model here and then take
an organization with which
you are familiar and try to
Activities position it on the model.
Where do you see some of
the major challenges in
adopting this kind of
approach base don digital
platforms?
 • Look at one of the major
innovation platforms now
operating – Apple, Amazon,
Facebook, Netflix, Alibaba,
Yandex, Google, etc.
• How has digital innovation
Activities played a role in enabling the
rapid growth of such
organizations?
• How far do they depend on
owning the assets on their
platforms and how far is it a case
of managing an ‘ecosystem’?
 • ‘Digital innovation is just a
case of putting old wine in
new bottles – the impact on
the way we manage the
Assessments
innovation process is
minimal’. Discuss the
arguments for and against
this point of view.
 • What do you see as the
main challenges in
developing a strategy for
digital innovation?
Assessments
• Is there a risk of a ‘digital
and
discussion divide’ with winners and
questions losers in digital innovation –
for example, in the field of
healthcare. Research the
question and try to illustrate
your answer with examples