Accelerating Innovation: Competitive Advantage through Ecosystem Engagement

A practical handbook for accelerating innovation, both internally and externally, through engagement with innovation ecosystems.

Leaders in large organizations face continuous pressure to innovate, and few possess all the internal resources needed to keep up with rapid advances in innovation, science, and technology. But looking beyond their own organizations, most face a bewildering landscape of external resources. In Accelerating Innovation, these leaders—whether from the private, public, or nonprofit sectors—will find a practical guide to this external landscape. Authors Phil Budden and Fiona Murray provide directions for navigating innovation ecosystems—those hotspots worldwide where researchers, entrepreneurs, and investors congregate.

While Silicon Valley and Greater Boston are popularly known for web-based digital technology and biotechnology, respectively, the logic of innovation ecosystems is not solely American—so this guide takes in new locations and varied sectors such as Singapore (smart cities), Perth (mining), Cairo and Dubai (fintech), London and Lagos (fintech and media), Copenhagen (quantum computing), Rio de Janeiro (energy), Halifax (oceans), and Tel Aviv (cybersecurity). Drawing practical advice from a synthesis of works on tech, innovation, entrepreneurship, and strategic management, and from a decade of their own research and teaching at the intersection of these topics, Budden and Murray distill insights and interconnections from all these different worlds into a useful and globally applicable set of frameworks and models. Their approach provides leaders at every organizational level with a clear and workable roadmap for making the most of the unique resources of innovation ecosystems.

Phil Budden is Senior Lecturer at MIT, where he teaches executives from public and private sectors and serves as diplomatic advisor for a range of courses and programs, including the MIT Regional Entrepreneurship Acceleration Program.

Fiona Murray is Professor and Dean at MIT and has served as an advisor to the UK prime minister on matters of science and technology policy for over a decade. She is a cofounder of the MIT Regional Entrepreneurship Acceleration Program and Vice Chair of the NATO Innovation Fund.