Together with one of my PhD students, Kathrine Egfjord, I just published a paper in Technological Forecasting and Social Change, entitled “Do you see what I see? How differing perceptions of the environment can hinder radical business model innovation“. In this paper we “suggest that differences in strategic issue identification and interpretation can help to explain the cognitive barriers that emerge when incumbent firms try to engage with radical business model innovation. We propose and test a Delphi-based method to elicit and examine differences in the perception of industry trends, comparing innovators, core business employees, and external experts, in the context of a leading Nordic insurance firm. We find considerable disagreement between members of the innovation department and the core business, in this firm. We suggest this helps explain why internal innovators find it challenging to “sell” radically new business models to the core business. More generally, we contribute to the growing literature on business model innovation in incumbent firms.” The full paper can be downloaded here.
Professor of Strategic Management (wsr)