8 Innovation process: how innovation happens in an organisation

The OECD/Eurostat definitions focus on what is innovated – goods, services, processes, or systems – rather than on how and why people or organisations might choose to develop or use an innovation, or how an innovation might be produced. So next we turn to consider the innovation process. The innovation process is not the same as a process innovation, but is instead the process of how innovation happens in organisations.

Innovation is a knowledge-based process, the means by which new ideas are developed and introduced. By itself, invention (or having a new idea, concept or design) is not enough – it needs to be part of a wider process that realises value. However, invention is not necessarily a part of the innovation process, although an element of novelty always is.

The innovation process may be understood with reference to the activities undertaken by individual innovators and organisations that are intended to result in innovation, including the research and development (R&D), financial and commercial activities required throughout the process. This is central to the management of technological innovation, and hence to much of this module.

While implementation is a necessary part of the innovation process, success is neither a requirement for an innovation to be counted as such, nor an essential consequence of the process (OECD/Eurostat, 2018). Clearly, success in capturing value from the innovation process is the main goal of the innovating organisation. However, innovations can fail once launched, although innovation management, innovation strategy and the innovativeness of the organisation play a big role in achieving success (Tidd and Bessant, 2018).

Figure 5 illustrates a simple model, developed by Tidd and Bessant (2018), of the innovation process as a series of phased activities, progressing from searching, selecting and implementing ideas in a context to capturing value for the innovating organisation.

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Figure 5: The Search, Select, Implement, Capture (SSIC) model of the innovation process (Tidd and Bessant, 2018)

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The diagram shows an arrow or funnel divided into sections with text describing the stages of the Search, Select, Implement and Capture (SSIC) model of the innovation process. It is a flow diagram from left (wider section of the funnel) pointing to the right (narrower section of the funnel). It starts on the left side with a section labelled ‘Search – how can we find opportunities for innovation?’ in an orange box, moving on to ‘Select – what are we going to do – and why?’ in a pink box, then ‘Implement – how are we going to make it happen?’ in a green box, and ending with ‘Capture – how are we going to get the benefits from it?’ in a purple box. Around the model is a blue shaded area and above the model is the question ‘Do we have a clear innovation strategy?’ and below the model is the question ‘Do we have an innovative organisation?’

Figure 5: The Search, Select, Implement, Capture (SSIC) model of the innovation process (Tidd and Bessant, 2018)

To learn more about the different phases of the innovation process, the next activity involves matching the description of the Search, Select, Implement and Capture (SSIC) phases to the correct description.