Innovation Management in the Network Economy – Acceleration of the Innovation Process and Reduction of Risk due to Virtualisation and Networking (dissertation)

One of the main characteristics of the Network Economy (NE) are enhanced networking capabilities, enabled by IT. Standalone exclusive adoption of these new possibilities of optimising single parts of the value chain does not create competitive advantages. Today and in future competitive advantages are mainly based on innovation ability. Innovation management is being confronted with hard requirements with regards to shorter innovation cycles and reduction of innovation risks. This fact faces a conflict of objective that itself leads to a prioritisation of one objective. It turns out that based on the possibilities of the NE both objectives can be achieved without having appreciable compromises. The design of innovation processes based on the knowledge of own core competencies must consider possibilities to incorporate specific competencies of external service providers and modification of product requirements during the development phase. For that purpose this thesis develops theoretic concepts and describes the practical implementation in the scope of three case studies.