2006 Inaugural Mays Marketing Research Camp Report
Innovation and New Product Management
Thursday, April 27 2006
Mays Business School
Texas A&M University
|
Manjit Yadav, Associate Professor, Mays Business School, Managing the Future: CEO Attention and Innovation Outcomes |
Manjit S.Yadav, Texas A&M University
Jaideep C.Prabhu, Imperial College, London
Rajesh K. Chandy, University of Minnesota
The central thesis of this research is that the CEO's attention patterns are predictive of innovation outcomes in subsequent time periods. Specifically, greater attention to events in the future and to external events leads to 1) faster detection of new technologies 1) faster development of initial products based on these new technologies and 3) greater deployment of radical innovations. The results suggest that future focus has a positive impact on detection, deployment and development. However, external and internal focus are positively related only to the detection of new technologies. External focus is important for development of new technologies, whereas neither external focus nor internal focus appear to predict deployment of new technologies. The major implication of this study is that the leader's attentional processes predict innovation outcomes.
The summary of the Q&A is as follows:
Q. Leaders move around to different organizations. As a result, the attention patterns might shift if the focus of the analysis is the individual.
R. The focus of the study is on the firm. Therefore, this study does not track whether CEOs in the firm remain the same over the period of the study.
Q. Do organizations know where they are going?
R. This study does not make any claims on how good the firms are about knowing the future. Rather, it focuses on whether temporal orientation predicts innovation outcomes
Q. Analyzing the content of the letters with respect to product markets could be a good idea to capture future focus.
