Navigating the Entrepreneurial Journey: Using Innovation to Bridge The Gaps Of Technological Discontinuity

This paper discusses the importance of formalizing a systematic approach to creativity and innovation in navigating the entrepreneurial journey. As the value of product and service innovations decline over time, technological discontinuities occur until new innovations are introduced. The proposed Strategic Visioning Model incorporates the theory of bisociation into the environmental scanning process. By analyzing the interactive effects of environmental factors in a cross-impact matrix, this model facilitates projecting opportunities and threats at a higher order of brainstorming activity. It is expected that this process will produce more unexpected and novel discoveries and innovative ideas for incumbents and new ventures. The Universe is undergoing a complete upheaval... Its nature is going to change so as to enable its creation anew."-Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406) The importance of innovation in sustaining a competitive advantage in the global economy is undeniable, since it can represent rare, valuable, and potentially inimitable sources of competitive advantage (Barney, 1991; Ahuja & Lampert, 2001). Breakthrough inventions introduced by incumbents and new entrants are at the core of entrepreneurial wealth creation thesis, innovation manifests in the form of new combinations of products, markets, supply sources, and organizations, creating paradigm shifts in the wealth potential of industries, products, and services. But Schumpeter maintained that only large corporations had the resources to implement these radical technologies. This perspective obviously does not take into account the 55% of U.S. patents that are generated by small business (www.sba.gov/advo/stats). More recently, Amit & Zott (2001) theorized that innovative models not only apply to products, production processes, distribution channels, and markets, but also to exchange mechanisms and transaction architectures such as electronic commerce. An expanded perspective of the innovative process provides a wider lens from which to analyze the potential for creating new Schumpeterian rent generation for investors. Although one of the purposes of entrepreneurship research is to understand how opportunities to manifest future goods and services are discovered, created, and exploited (Venkatraman, 1997; Smilor, 1997) little research has been done on the entrepreneurial process of innovative. Instead it has been considered a random act of a lone inventor in the entrepreneurial context, or the residual of technological research and development efforts within 3 the corporate venturing context, but has not been linked to environmental scanning in the strategic planning context. What is needed is a model for formalizing the innovation process to facilitate creative business opportunities. According to Schumpeter (1939), innovation in the form …