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12 Essential Innovation Insights

September 6, 2017 | Martha E. Mangelsdorf, Bruce Posner | Innovation

Innovation is a perennial management challenge. That’s why, for decades, MIT Sloan Management Review has been publishing new research and insights about innovation, from business school researchers as well as from leading business executives and consultants.

For this article, the authors tapped into that knowledge base. They combed through the MIT SMR archives, looking for older articles with innovation insights that today’s MIT SMR readers might have missed but that still remain timely and have wide relevance. The authors winnowed their list to 12 essential innovation articles from the MIT SMR archives. They distilled key concepts from those archival articles into 12 brief innovation insights contained in this article. The insights cover a range of innovation-related topics — from managing innovative employees to innovating in different ways — and draw on work by researchers from a number of universities, including Cambridge Judge Business School, Harvard Business School, London Business School, and the MIT Sloan School of Management.

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