13 - Will Innovation Change Innovation?

Summary

In the book’s first chapter, we looked at how technological change created conditions for the emergence and dominance of a specific form of innovation management. Coming full circle, this chapter asks how further technological change might challenge that form. We begin with technological change that is already here and that has begun to impact how innovation is managed. In Baldwin and von Hippel’s analysis, innovations in communication technologies and design tools are given credit for the expanding role of nonfirms in innovation, effecting shifts in the locus of innovation in society away from producer-firms toward users and peer-to-peer collaborations. In that view, firms might be poised to play a much smaller role in the innovation process of the future. Examining some of the same technologies, Altman et al. do not see the imminent end of firm-centric innovation. Instead, they propose that innovation management will evolve, that firms will take on new forms of collaboration and more porous boundaries to fully benefit from the possibilities of technological change. To close, we turn again to the question of how artificial intelligence might play into the further transformation of organizations. Cockburn et al.’s analysis asks whether artificial intelligence might be a method in the method of invention and what that might mean for the future of innovation and economic development.