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Arne Stjernholm  Danish Initiative for Creativity & Innovation 

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My interest for the relationship between cognition and innovation led me to starting up a DBA research project (Doctor of Business Administration) at Copenhagen Business School by December 01, 2006. The project has the working title "Mental Models Management" and is inspired by Kuhn's theory on scientific paradigms, which is also reflected in technology development. Technologies develop in periods of improvements and exploitation of certain technologies, disrupted by the breakthrough of alternative technologies, which change the rule of the game. Traditionally, large companies have a hard time making the transition into new paradigms; Often, smaller, entrant companies, not being held back by traditions and historical competences, are more successful in seizing the new opportunities. Roughly speaking, my research project aims at examining how large companies can experiment with alternative mental models in the pursuit of making new leaps towards breakthrough innovations. Let me quote the problem statement of my research proposal:

"Innovation breakthroughs arguably imply a shift in mindset. Given that an organization strives for innovation breakthroughs:

• How can the management team deliberately reinvent the mental models of an organization?
• How can the management team ensure that new mental models lead to innovation breakthroughs, all the way from conception to successful execution?
• What could serve as a theoretical foundation for such management practise?"

Here are a couple of further quotes on the background:

"Mental models form the way of thinking in an organization or even within a whole industry, just like a scientific paradigm form a way of research and problem solving within a science (Kuhn, 1964). Innovation breakthroughs seem to imply a shift in mental models at the innovating organization, followed by the rest of the industry. Similar, researchers describe how the management of 'breakthrough' innovation processes requires different mental models as compared to 'incremental' innovation (J. Bessant, 2003; R. Leifer, 2000; C. Christensen, 2000, 2003). - R. Leifer et al (2000) describe how radical and incremental innovation call for two different management approaches, implying that although new mental models are prerequisite for innovation breakthroughs, they are not sufficient to secure success in the operational execution of innovation breakthroughs.

The experiences of the company's trajectory provide invaluable knowledge with regards to future problem solving. On the other hand, this "knowledge limits your ability to achieve profoundly new insights and solutions, since your "vocabulary" is bound to experiences of the past and may hinder interception of solutions contradicting these experiences - as for instance new solutions made possible by the introduction of new technologies, new market players etc." (Madsen, 2005). The famous 'not-invented-here' effect could be seen as a concrete manifestation of this problem."