Innovative firms outperform, in both employment and sales, firms that fail to innovate [1]. We know that those organizations that are consistently successful at managing innovation outperform their peers in terms of growth, financial performance, and employment and that the broader social benefits of innovation are even greater [2]. However, managing innovation is not easy or automatic. It requires skills and knowledge, which are significantly different to the standard management toolkit and experience, because most management training and advice are aimed to maintain stability, hence the most sought after degree is an MBA – Master of Business Administration. As a result, most organizations either simply do not formally manage the innovation process or manage it in an ad hoc way. Studies confirm that only around 12% of organizations successfully manage innovation, and only half of these organizations do so consistently across time [3].

Since the first edition of Managing Innovation was published in 1997, we have argued consistently that successful innovation management is much more than managing a single aspect, such as creativity, entrepreneurship, research and development, or product development [4]. Our companion texts deal with such issues more fully [5], but here we continue to promote an integrated process approach, which deals with the interactions between changes in markets, technology, and organization. In this sixth edition, we continue our tradition of differentiating our work from that of others by developing its unique characteristics:

• Strong evidence-based approach to the understanding and practice of managing innovation, drawing upon thousands of research projects, and “Research Notes” on the very latest research findings. Managing Innovation had more than 8000 citations in Google Scholar in 2017;
• Practical, experience-tested processes, models, and tools, including “View,” first-person accounts from practicing managers on the challenges they face managing innovation;
• Extensive additional interactive resources, available from the Wiley Book Companion Site (BCS), including video, audio pod casts, innovation tools, interactive exercises, and tests to help apply the learning. Further video is available on our YouTube channel, innovation masters (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCG3tXfZXJpDZOGJXuzCUVLw/videos).

In this fully updated sixth edition, we draw upon the latest research and practice, and have extended our coverage of topical and relevant subjects, including business model innovation, open innovation, user innovation and crowdsourcing, service and social innovation.

Our understanding of innovation continues to develop, through systematic research, experimentation, and the ultimate test of management practice and experience. As a result, it is a challenge for all of us interested in innovation to keep abreast of this fast-developing and multidisciplinary field. In the general field of business research, the 200 or so active research centers worldwide produce some 5000 papers each year, many relevant to managing innovation [6]. In the more specialist fields of technology and innovation management, the 120 research centers worldwide publish several hundreds of papers each year [7]. One goal of this book is to help make sense and navigate through this mass of material. Another is to encourage action. As we declared in the first edition, and still believe strongly, this book is designed to encourage and support practice, and organization-specific experimentation and learning, and not to substitute for it.

We would like to acknowledge the extensive feedback, support, and contributions from users of the previous editions, our own colleagues and students, the team at Wiley, and the growing community of innovation scholars and professionals who have contributed directly to this sixth edition, in particular, the generous participants in the workshops we ran in London, Manchester, Melbourne Rotterdam, Berlin, Barcelona, Helsinki, Budapest, and Kuala Lumpur.