Tracking the route of innovation across projects: insights from two case studies

Literature Review New Product Development (NPD) performance firstly appeared as a sufficient way to maintain a competitive advantage. The literature on NPD tackled the issue by defining models of development project organization (Brown and Eisenhardt 1995; Clark and Fujimoto 1991; Midler 1993). Although it succeeded to dramatically improve development cost and quality, NPD is challenged by the increasing pressure to develop more innovation-intensive products(Hatchuel and al. 2006). As a consequence, researches focus more and more on front-end activities (Smith and Reinertsen 1991; Ulrich and Eppinger 1995) and on the effective integration of differentiating innovations within development projects (Chesbrough 2003; Iansiti 1998). But the link between product performance and the ability of the firm to maintain a strategic advantage remains puzzling. The NPD approach focuses roughly on the transition from R to D on a single generation of products. So it hardly screens the progression of a competitive advantage and misses the inter-project learning cycles (Maidique and Zirger 1985). Recently the concept of dynamic capabilities (Teece and al. 1997) renewed this approach and enlarged the relevant scope of evaluation to technological trajectories, or intertemporal integration across projects (Marsh and Stock 2006). Research purpose Despite the dynamic capability approach looking promising, we still miss accurate lenses to identify and evaluate the progression of a single innovation (for example a technological feature) across different projects. Therefore we define the concept of innovation route to characterize this trajectory between project development activities and what we call ‘knowledge activities': advanced research and technical design rules activities. We think that there are important sources of progress in a better coordination between this two processes. Methodology et Data collection We used this framework on two case studies, following an inductive methodology that was proven to be particularly relevant for such new issues (Eisenhardt 1989). We chose to focus the study on the automotive industry. We had access to key managers and intern documentation of car manufacturers and tier-1 suppliers. We conducted 42 interviews of various manager profiles (project, research, purchasing, support, technical…) that were involved in the progression of two technological features. The overall approach consisted in tracking the route of two innovations from their very rough beginnings to their multi-product deployment, by using 4 criteria: customer value, integrability within new products, technology maturity, and profitability. Research implications The first important result is to confirm the relevance of such multi-project approaches that aim to better understand the nature of dynamic capabilities, and the way of managing them. The case studies also showed that innovation management cannot only consist in the management of a succession of projects, but rather of several innovation routes across projects. Our current research focuses on the definition of a reliable evaluation pattern to follow the improvement of a technological feature along theses routes. Based on this framework, we are to shift from a case study approach to a systematic innovation process benchmark, in connection with academics and companies from Japan and the United States.