Innovation is a beautiful thing. It is a force with both aesthetic and pragmatic appeal: It unleashes our creativity spirit, opening our minds to hirherto undreamed of possibilities, while simultaneously accelerating economic growth and providing advances in such crucial human endeavors as medicine, agriculture, and education. For industrial organizations, the primary engines of innovation in the Western world, innovation provides both exceptional opportunities and steep challenges. While innovation is a powerful means of competitive differentiation, enabling forms to penetrate new markets and achieve higher margins, it is also a competitive race that must be run with speed, skill, and precision. It is no enough for a form to be innovative - to be successful it must innovate better than its competitors.

As scholars and managers have raced to better understand innovation, a wide range of work on the topic has emerged and flourished in disciplines such as strategic management, organization theory, economics, marketing, engineering, and sociology. This work has generated many insights about how innovation affects the competitive dynamics of markets, how firms can strategically manage innovation, and how firms can implement their innovation strategies to maximize their likehood of success. A great benefit of the dispersion of this literature across such diverse domains of study is that many innovation topics have been examined from different angles. However, this diversity also can pose integration challenges to both instructors and students. This book seeks to integrate this wide body of work into a single coherent strategic framework, attempting to provide coverage that is rigorous, inclusive, and accessible.