The Innovation Game (PDF)

RandD is the single most important investment for any company or any society. Its ultimate product is an innovation. Innovations are on the other side the major propeller for the respective (socio-) economic development of the very company or society.

Management and management science mainly treat RandD and innovations as costs or budgets to be managed, an approach that is in stark contrast to their overwhelming importance. This and the very fact that RandD and innovation success is a by necessity a-priori unknown and thus uncertain ex-post definition is not at all being respected properly up to now.

In The Innovation Game La Corre and Mishchke consider RandD and innovation as an inherently risky investment which should be profitable, at least on average. Applying a statistical filter model, the authors are able to describe the RandD- and the innovation-process in great detail, almost like a production process. As a metaphor, the book tries to describe it like the control laws of the "distillery for inno-success knowledge".

The corresponding control model and the derived inno-management rules do allow the authors to compute and optimize the respective success-chances, the appropriate processes and the suited organizational structures of a targeted "inno-success distillery", the innovation-/RandD-pipeline, in an unprecedented way.