Diagnosing the Market-Driven Approach to Innovation: Learning from Practice

Market-driven innovation features an outside-in approach to strategic growth issues. This approach is guided by an organic growth strategy and a dashboard of innovation metrics, while iterating between outside-in considerations and the possibilities and constraints of inside-out factors, and enabled by dynamic sensing and seizing capabilities. This paper describes how this approach is integrated with technology-driven approaches to innovation, and activated through four core activities: identifying growth opportunities, selecting and validating the best opportunities, containing risks in the portfolio of innovation initiatives, and then launching and scaling the outcome of the development activities. We propose a research agenda that addresses the antecedents, moderators, and consequences of market-driven innovation, and the process of implementing this approach.