Managing Cross-Industry Innovations: A Search Strategy for Radical Eco-innovations

Abstract

Companies can enhance their internal knowledge and develop innovations by working together with external partners from their own value chain. Besides this common open innovation strategy, the cooperation with partners from distant industries is becoming ever more important for companies as this concept can be a significant source for radical eco-innovations. These cross-industry innovations (CII) can lead to lower development time, lower project risks, and higher growth rates and margins owing to the discovery of radical innovations. We have found that due to a lack of existing process models and methods, companies implement cross-industry innovation strategies – in the most part – unsystematically and that the TRIZ database approach, the knowledge broker approach, and a creativity workshop with external experts and lead users are the most appropriate methods to creating cross-industry eco-innovations. The contribution of this chapter is, firstly, to analyze why the cross-industry innovation framework can have significant influence on the creation of radical eco-innovations and, secondly, to present a step-by-step process which should help companies – and especially innovation managers – to systematically implement eco-innovations across industries in the fuzzy front end of the innovation process.