Leveraging communities for sustainable innovation: a commentary.

The concept of using future innovation to achieve “right to market” (R2M) (Koudal & Coleman, 2005) is the focus of this paper. This paper discusses the relationship between entrepreneurship and innovation and posits that they form a system where innovation is optimised when these capabilities are closely linked. The authors contend that innovation activities are best ‘managed’ by an organization’s entrepreneur(s) and that part of this role is to identify Innovation Champions and facilitate their innovation-related activities. The authors also explore the social and community interaction necessary for innovation to flourish and explain the role of entrepreneurs in forming Communities of Innovation (CoInv) based on innovation champions and their networks. This paper argues that CoInv are essential to ensure that each separate innovation has commercial potential and is operationally accepted with support diffused throughout the organisation. The authors demonstrate these assertions through a case discussion and conclude with some final comments on the future of this research.

Originally paper was presented at The XX ISPIM Conference: The Future of Innovation, held in Vienna, Austria - 21-24 June 2009.