A Framework for Managing Innovation

Innovation is critical in all types of organizations. Yet, it remains one of the most challenging efforts to perform and manage. This paper attempts to provide three insights on the challenge to innovate: first, a conceptual framework that breaks the complexity of innovation efforts down into three key phases, namely ideation, selection and execution. We then review the extant literature that has emerged over the last 20 years on the management of innovation, highlighting studies that offer specific insights for each of the three phases of our framework. While admittedly we adopt an operations research/ operations management (OR/OM) perspective on the literature, we showcase the breadth, depth and relevance of this growing body of literature. Finally, we identify that there is no one standard recipe that enables innovation. Instead the activities, structures and rules to perform innovation depend on the type of innovation outcomes, incremental or radical, pursued by an organization