Hargadon is an Associate Professor of Technology Management and Director of Technology Management programs at the Graduate School of Management at University of California, Davis. His research has been used to develop or guide innovative programs in organizations as diverse as the Canadian Health Services, Silicon Valley start-ups, Hewlett-Packard, and the US Navy. He teaches corporate executive programs and gives lectures on the creativity, design, and the management of innovation. His most recently published book is How Breakthroughs Happens.
For many who read this book, Hargadon suggests, it may well be a “surprising truth” that innovation succeeds “not by breaking free from constraints of the past but instead by harnessing the past in powerful new ways.” Hargadon stresses the importance of an innovation strategy which seeks to take full advantage of what can be learned from the past in order to create, anticipate, or at least recognize the future. His core concept is “technology brokering” which he introduces and then rigorously examines in Part I; next, in Part II, he describes the “networked perspective” of innovation, explaining how this strategy influences the innovative process within organizations, regardless of their size and nature; finally, in Part III, Hargadon provides specific and practical examples of how various organizations have designed and then implemented technology brokering strategies. Throughout the narrative, Hargadon explores in depth with rigor his core premise: “that breakthrough innovation comes by recombining the people, ideas, and objects of past technologies.” In fact, agreeing with Drucker and others, Hargadon insists that the future is already here, that the “raw materials for the next breakthrough technology may [also] be already here [but probably] without assembly instructions,” that decision-makers must find their “discomfort zones” rather than remain hostage to what Jim O’Toole calls “the ideology of comfort and the tyranny of custom,” and that they should build a “bridge” to their own strengths but also to their weaknesses because, as they perform, so will their organization. Hargadon suggests that innovation must unfold at the ground level, “in the minds and hearts of the engineers and entrepreneurs who are doing the work.” Also, that–meanwhile–they and their associates must be guided and informed, not only by their own organization’s beds of knowledge but also by external sources of information concerning prior successes and failures of the innovation process elsewhere. In the final analysis, there is good news and bad news. First the bad news: “New ideas are built from the pieces of old ones, and nobody works alone.” Now the good news: “New ideas are built from the pieces of old ones, and nobody works alone.”
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