Manage Your Company’s Innovation Interdependencies

In face of growing competitive pressures, many companies broaden their innovation activities beyond product development to address other types of innovation, such as new services, processes, and business models, which traditionally were often neglected. There are important interfaces among these innovation types, but their interplay is often ignored. The findings of 45 exploratory interviews underscore the managerial relevance of innovation interdependencies. A framework with the different innovation types is developed, and a case example of car-sharing is described. Moreover, the performance implications and implementation steps for actively managing innovation interdependencies are described. Without considering the interplay of multiple innovation types, the potential benefits of a firm’s innovation activities will not fully materialize. Consequently, many firms’ difficulties in profiting from innovation do not derive from an inappropriate management of product innovation. Instead, many of these difficulties can be traced back to an insufficient attention to innovation interdependencies.