Strategic Innovation Management:A Cross - Functional Vision to be Materialised

For long-term success, "(strategic) innovation has become systemic and drives capitalist economic advantage” (Romer, 1990; Burton-Jones, 2001, as cited in Shams, 2015, p. 161). In general, strategic innovation in business needs a proper understanding of the needs, wants and expectations of the target market (Bresciani et al., 2012), in order to satisfy those needs through the commercialisation of the outcome of a business innovation process. In addition to the business innovation management centred on the issues related to a single business functional area, the cross-functional input from different functional areas of a business firm is, in general, instrumental to proactively plan, implement and monitor the strategic innovation management process in business, in order to enhance and sustain the impact of a newly innovated product/service, idea, technology or management process on long-term business success. However, a concise review of the extant literature in this chapter suggests that the cross-functional business innovation teams play an imperative role in the organisation-wide strategic innovation management process; the review also reveals that the current research in this field is not adequate to proactively explore the diverse issues in business, related to the overall implications of cross-functional business teams for strategic innovation management, focusing on diverse socio-economic environments and business settings.