Risk Conception and Risk Management in Corporate Innovation: Lessons from Two Swedish Cases

Risk is central to innovation, but in order to be theoretically interesting and of practical use, the relation between risk and innovation needs to be investigated in more specific situations. This paper explores the risk conceptions of innovators in two large corporations and identifies three themes that illuminate the relationship between risk and innovation in the corporate setting. The first relates risk to the issues of boundaries and control over parts of the innovation process; the second shows how risk is primarily related to innovation as process and not as output, and the third shows how a flexible view of business models can be used to manage risk in corporate innovation.