You are currently viewing @doctorregtech comments: It was 10 years ago today! My academic debut!

@doctorregtech comments: It was 10 years ago today! My academic debut!

In June 2009 I presented my first paper at my first academic conference. This historic event took place at the International Product Development Management Conference at the University of Twente in Einschede, Holland. The working paper presented (by myself and my colleague Martin Sköld) had the title “Mapping the winds of creative destruction in the Nordic financial services industry”. The title is an homage to the seminal paper “Innovation: mapping the winds of creative destruction” by the legendary researchers William Abernathy and Kim Clarke from 1985. They had in turn taken the “creative destruction” terminology from the economist Joseph Schumpeter (look under Good reads on the website if you want to read more).

The study we presented in the paper investigated, by performing 50 semi-structured interviews, which forces create innovation in financial services. The results are even more relevant today, since we highlighted three key sources of innovation:

1) Customers,

2) Technology

3) Regulations

If we had done the study today the results would probably have been the same. In the paper we give examples of innovations across four different innovation categories: incremental, modular, architectural and radical (based on the paper by Rebecca Henderson and Kim Clarke from 1990). As a result, we introduced a cube type structure explaining innovation patterns in the financial services industry.

Until now the paper has not made it to official publication as an academic journal article. In 2010 the data and the results were re-used to produce the white paper “Solving the innovation puzzle” from IBM Institute for Business Value (together with Christian Bieck). Also, the findings about the central role of regulations as a source of innovation made me decide to focus my coming PhD thesis on that topic. But that is a completely different story.

Do you want to learn more about how you can apply the detailed findings behind the paper? Engage Freij Insight to use the associated frameworks and models.