Chapter 5:
The Process of Innovation

There is no single innovation process that every organization follows. On one extreme, some organizations await a creative marketing or engineering guru to discover the “big idea” that will push the organization ahead to new revenue heights. On the other end, one product development company in Minneapolis has a rigid-but-effective 28- step process for developing high-tech medical products. Both approaches can work. This chapter will illuminate several processes that organizations use successfully.