Satish Nambisan is professor of technology management and strategy at the Lally School of Management Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, and Mohanbir Sawhney is McCormick Tribune Professor of Technology and the Director of the Center for Research in Technology & Innovation at the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University.
In this book, the authors trace the titanic shift from Firm Centric to Network Centric Innovation and prescribe 4 models to tap the Global Brains.
Innovation used to be something companies did within their four walls. Thousands of researchers and scientists toiled deep within the bowels of large corporations to create the next big thing. Corporations attempted to hire the best and the brightest researchers and managers to drive research and new product development. Then came Internet , Open Source ,Crowd sourcing, Open Innovation etc and consultants, academics , media joined the chorus to liberate innovation from organizational boundaries.
The Global Brain is rich and diverse- a large number of innovative firms as well as a large pool of innovative people exist in different parts of the world whose knowledge and creativity can be leveraged by the companies. Moreover, new types of innovation intermediaries and new technological infrastructure have made tapping into such global network of innovators, scientists and innovative firms easier than even before. Thus the imperative for sourcing external innovation is matched by the rapidly expanding horizon of innovation opportunities.
Network Centric Innovation (NCI) is an externally focused approach to innovation that relies on harnessing the resources and capabilities of external networks and communities to amplify or enhance innovation speed and the quality of innovation outcomes. A wide variety of networks, players and roles are emerging; business ecosystems, alliance constellations, open source communities, expert communities, inventor communities, customer communities etc. Network Centric Innovation embraces these different types and also captures the unique approaches to organizing innovation that arise from the combination of different types of networks and interactions of companies with different types of innovation networks.
The concept of NIC has four defining principles: shared goals, shared world-view, social knowledge creation and architecture of participation. The four models of network centric innovation are: The orchestra model,The creative bazaar model, The Jam central model, The MOD station model.
