Organization structures for nurturing breakthrough technologies


The article Organizing for New Technologies in MIT Sloan review has some interesting thoughts about organization structures necessary to get the most out of emerging technologies. The article starts off by defining and distinguishing invention and innovation:

To understand the challenge, one first needs to recognize the distinction between the new idea (invention) and its subsequent commercialization through a product or service (innovation). This is important because, within established companies, the decision-making processes and logic governing inventions differ significantly from those governing commercialization. Engineering and scientific personnel typically drive inventions within new technological domains, whereas business development and marketing managers drive the subsequent commercialization.

I am not sure if all R&D executives will agree with the definition of innovation, the ideas for organization structures seem to be quite valuable.
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