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In this interview, Professor Andrew Hargadon talks to editor Sarah Powell about the concept of technology brokering as the key to innovation. Andrew Hargadon is Associate Professor of Technology Management at the Graduate School of Management, University of California, Davis and Director of the School's Technology Management Programs. An engineer by profession, prior to becoming an academic Andrew Hargadon worked as a product designer, initially for David Kelley Design (now IDEO Product Development) and then for Apple Computer. Subsequently, as a consultant in product design and development, he has worked with clients such as Briggs & Stratton, Hewlett‐Packard, Nike, Praxis Product Design and Vivecon.

The author explains that changing both the company’s offerings and its organization exponentially increases the complexity and uncertainty of any new undertaking, which is why business model innovation is both so difficult and, when successful, so hard for competitors to respond to.

The example of how SolarCity introduced a new business model in 2008 designed around third-party ownership illustrates many of the steps Solar-City took to redesign their offering as well as the capabilities to deliver it.

Design teams often build prototypes of new products and test their performance or test their appeal to users. It is much more difficult to design and test a novel financial model and more difficult still to sell that design to a company’s leadership and its investors or lenders.

Rather than dive into details of the product development, organizational design or financials, the innovation team should rank order the largest sources of the project’s uncertainties and focus on identifying any fatal flaws before much time and money are spent.

A new business model should not be the initial goal but the by-product of a process that focuses on maximizing the long-term value you provide to your customers.

The author has spent the last ten years studying the innovation process in modern organizations and found that the most successful firms pursue an innovation strategy termed technology brokering.

How are the objectives achieved? Include the main method(s) used for the research. What is the approach to the topic and what is the theoretical or subject scope of the paper?

Rather than chasing wholly new ideas, these successful firms focus on recombining old ideas in new ways. The results have sparked many technological revolutions and produced a steady stream of growth opportunities for existing businesses.

Needs cases showing that technology brokering, and the complementary work practices and people, can successfully execute such a strategy.

By transforming traditional R&D organizations through a strategy of technology brokering firms can build competencies for continuous innovation..

To pursue a strategy of recombinant innovation, corporate leaders must put themselves in position to be the first to see how existing technologies in one market could be used to create breakthrough innovations in another.

When entrepreneurs create new ventures, they struggle with making consequential decisions under severe restrictions such as tight deadlines, limited resources, and lack of information. Making challenging decisions inherently requires creativity as entrepreneurs improvise and work around the limitations they face. Under these conditions, entrepreneurs resort to their heuristics and biases instead of rational decision models. Entrepreneurs employ – sometimes for better and sometimes for worse – a myriad of rule-setting heuristics and experience-based biases to navigate the difficult path between novelty and utility. In this chapter, the authors answer Shepherd, Williams, and Patzelt’s (2015) call for research into how entrepreneurs leverage heuristics and biases in decision-making and the benefits they gain as a result. The authors explore how entrepreneurs introduce heuristics and biases at different stages of their decision-making process using a qualitative study of 21 new ventures. The results attest to entrepreneurs’ ingenuity and creativity in managing complexity, ambiguity, and uncertainty.

How can leaders adopt a mindset that maximizes learning, remains responsive to short-term emergent opportunities, and simultaneously strengthens longer-term dynamic capabilities of the organization? This chapter explores the organizational decisions and practices leaders can initiate to extend, strengthen, or transform “ordinary capabilities” (Winter, 2003) into enhanced improvisational competence and dynamic capabilities. We call this leadership logic the “jazz mindset.” We draw upon seven characteristics of jazz bands as outlined by Barrett (1998) to show that strategic leaders of business organizations can enhance dynamic capabilities by strengthening practices observed in improvising jazz bands.

Advising top management how to find the right balance between corporate creativity and efficiency in order to turn innovation into commercial reality.

The author interviewed senior corporate managers and reviewed the literature.

Inventiveness is required in everything that is done by the company, not just in marketing or in new product development. A key factor in boosting innovativeness is establishing the right organizational climate to nurture the creative potential of employees and make use of their knowledge of customers, competitors, and processes. When leveraging the best innovation practices of other companies look to their philosophy and values.

More interviews and a study to determine long‐term success factors would be advisable.

Key practices: place people and ideas at the heart of management philosophy; give people room to grow, to try and learn from mistakes; build a strong sense of openness and trust and community; and facilitate the internal mobility of talent.

The author advises innovation leaders on steps they can take to strike the right balance between corporate creativity and efficiency.