Conceptualising strategic innovation leadership for competitive survival and excellence

For a very long time, literature on innovation focused only on the product innovation of the new product development process. Existing literature highlights the difficulties for companies in maintaining the ability to continuously innovate, improve the innovation process and learn from the innovation process. Until recently, the literature has not dealt with the strategic (and combined) use of innovation and leadership in order for companies to be leaders in the industry- What we term as innovation leadership.

The significance of innovation is widely acknowledged in a range of organizations, societies and in global competition. Thus, it is important for companies to develop the ability to lead innovation and to understand what leadership of innovation is all about. Innovation is an ongoing, never-ending concept and process. Though literature exists on managing innovation, innovation management mainly addresses the issue of company survival. Innovation leadership has many more aspects to it than management, and companies need to be in the core of the innovation process.

In order for a company to effectively implement innovation leadership, we propose these five components for our model on innovation leadership:

1. Which is more befitting the situation-radical or incremental innovation?

2. The field of innovation (product, technology, networks, competencies)

3. What are our success criteria-long-term or short-term?

4. What type of product development model should we use?

5. What enablers should we include and manipulate in order for the product

development to be efficient and effective?

Our model of innovation leadership comprises six elements:

Production innovation leadership (upstream)Production process innovation leadership (upstream)HRM innovation leadership (upstream)Network innovation leadership (upstream)Product innovation leadership (downstream)Customer innovation leadership (downstream)

Our discussion chiefly concerns the challenges of innovation leadership while introducing our proposed framework. In the final manuscript, we will include practical suggestions on how to implement innovation leadership in companies.