Description

In the age of perpetual technological disruption and shortening product life-cycles, innovation has become the decisive battlefield on which firms either secure competitive advantage or fade into irrelevance. Yet the mere declaration that "innovation matters" is no longer sufficient; managers and scholars alike must understand how, under what conditions, and through which mechanisms knowledge is transformed into repeatable, scalable, and profitable innovation outcomes. This book tackles that challenge by integrating two traditionally separate conversations: the strategic-management discourse on knowledge-based capabilities and the operations-research literature on nonlinear innovation dynamics. Our central thesis is that sustainable innovation performance is not simply a function of how much a firm spends on R&D or how many patents it files; rather, it is an emergent property of a complex adaptive system in which environmental uncertainty, the structure of the knowledge base (breadth versus depth), the velocity of knowledge integration, and the intrinsic chaos of resource allocation interact in subtle, often counter-intuitive ways.