Workshop: Essentials of Strategic Innovation

Event Type: Workshop
Location: Online

Date/Time: 04/14/2026

11 am - 3 pm

Innovation, Strategic Planning

In today’s environment, mature organizations are facing extreme levels of risk and uncertainty, due to external events such as the effects of COVID and geopolitical unrest. Under these circumstances they operate to minimize risk, and as a result are caught in the web of short termism and incrementalism to maintain competitive advantage in their current markets. Yet this approach does not produce generative growth and leaves the organization vulnerable to red oceans and eventual disruption.

Typically, company leaders address this conundrum by investing to develop an innovative culture, oftentimes with disappointing results for breakthrough new business opportunities. Although inventors and intrapreneurs can benefit from the resources, experience, financial assets and networks of the large company, they are constrained by its bureaucratic practices. Over time, leaders come to realize that they need to develop organizational capabilities to create new platforms of business that will be their growth engines of the future. Historically, however, these efforts have produced uneven success. Cyclically, corporate leaders renew their desire for innovation beyond incremental new product development (i.e. strategic innovation) and focus attention on developing management systems that work with, rather than against innovative and intrapreneurial associates.

In this session, we will explore how strategic innovation differs from incremental innovation, and how companies can develop a capability for strategic innovation in order to avoid disruption and create their future. We focus at the organizational level rather than the individual project level. Our interest is in understanding how organizations can institutionalize capabilities for the more breakthrough innovation, which admittedly faces more uncertain outcomes, even within a dominant culture of operational excellence that pervades most large established firms.

We will examine these questions:

What is Strategic Innovation and why do large mature organizations need it?

Why is it so difficult?

What approaches have organizations tried and what are the advantages and shortcomings of each?

What approach seems to work, why do we think it’s the answer, and why is it so difficult for companies to adopt?

How is it accomplished? What steps can you take to advance that effort?

This session will be of interest to anyone who aspires to help a mature organization create its future through strategic innovation.

IRI members can earn a certificate of completion by completing this workshop and a short follow-on activity that highlights how they plan to apply their learning.

Registration Fees:

IRI Members: $395
Non Members: $495

Each IRI member company has two complimentary passes for this event.

Get Your Member Comp Code

Due to limited seating, we request that you cancel at least 48 hours before a scheduled class. This gives us the opportunity to fill the class. However, if you do not cancel prior to the 48 hours, you will lose the payment for the class.

All IRI events are broadcast in Eastern Standard Time

Gina O'Connor

Professor O’Connor joined Babson in January 2019. She conducts research, develops curricula and facilitates learning for graduate students and executives based on her research findings on Breakthrough Innovation in large mature companies. Before joining Babson Gina spent 29 years at the Lally School of Management at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, where she held the roles of Professor of Marketing and Innovation Management, Associate Dean for Academic Affairs, Director of the MBA program, Director of the Severino Center for Technological Entrepreneurship and Director of the Radical Innovation Research Program. Prior to earning her PhD in Marketing and Corporate Strategy at NYU, she worked as a contract administrator for McDonnell Douglas Corporation and as a research analyst for Monsanto’s Department of Social Responsibility in St. Louis, Missouri. Professor O’Connor has published papers in leading journals including Journal of Product Innovation Management, Organization Science, Journal of Marketing and Journal of Business Venturing. Five of her papers have received best paper of the year awards in their respective journals. Gina has co-authored three books on breakthrough innovation. The second of those: Grabbing Lightning: Building a Capability for Breakthrough Innovation, was named one of the top three business books of the year by Strategy + Business Magazine. In 2018 she was named a Crawford Fellow by the Product Development and Management Association, one of only six recipients of that award. Gina’s professional objective is to help large established companies learn how to renew themselves through organic growth via step-out, game changing, breakthrough, strategic innovation, which introduces high levels of uncertainty into the innovation process and is typically stamped out in organizations. She is a firm believer that, to be successful, companies must develop an innovation function, complete with its own people, processes, metrics and culture that operates within the company to translate emerging science, technology and business models into whole new platforms of growth that will fuel the company’s future health in spite of itself. She is an active speaker and consultant for a number of US and European companies, and is passionate about developing the next cadre of innovation leaders. On the personal side, Gina’s permanent home is in Albany NY, where she lives with her husband. Their three children are spread across the country doing their best to make the world a better place. They are all members of the board of directors of a larger family owned operating foundation, Fostering Hope, which serves the needs of foster parents.