The center's research focuses around various aspects of innovation practice, belonging to three themes:

• Business Modeling and Entrepreneurial Learning
• Discontinuous Business Innovation
• Green Business Innovation

Each theme corresponds to a meta project which will result in a book describing the current industry and research frontiers on that theme's particular topic. Research within the themes is mainly conducted through one or several research projects, often of empirical nature.

The latest research resulting from the various projects is presented in our working paper series and through regular publications. If you are interested in some of our sources of inspiration, check out the recommended readings page.

At CBI, research projects are run within the three current themes all pertaining to innovation management. The themes are then redefined to address the next set of important issues. The deliverables from each theme are research papers and associated dissemination activities. The end deliverable is a book aimed for advanced practitioners and academic readers. Current (2007 - 2009) themes are:

Theme 1: Business Modeling and Entrepreneurial Learning

Creating a truly new business is almost always a real challenge for the people and actors involved, be it through an established firm or through the formation of a new independent firm.

We know from experience and from theory that the original ideas and envisioned business logic of such a venture is substantially changed over time. During the process of business innovation opportunities are redefined and the business models and organizational models by which opportunities are being exploited undergo expensive and tedious changes during such a process. The process is one of ‘entrepreneurial learning’ and is truly evolutionary rather than something that can be planned in detail; “you do not know what you do not know”. Assumptions about customers, needs, technology, competition and a whole range of items have to be tested and validated.  This causes a fundamental problem of uncertainty intimately associated with innovation rather than the mere risk involved.
The aim of this theme is to develop knowledge and empirically validated theories and methods of how to more cost effectively and timely organize and manage the process of creating a new profitable business.

Theme 2: Discontinuous Business Innovation

A fundamental problem is that the capabilities used for organizing and managing “steady state innovation” are not necessarily the ones that are needed to support and facilitate discontinuous innovation. Rather, the traditional innovation capabilities, manifested in stage-gate models, project evaluation schemes, and traditional organizational structures and processes, may actually turn out to hamper discontinuous innovation.

While we know a lot about how to manage the steady state kind of innovation we know much less about how to build discontinuous innovation capability. Smart firms are experimenting with different things in this direction, but we are all still learning about discontinuous innovation - and there is thus an opportunity to contribute to both theory and practice in this field. In particular there is a need to attend to discontinuities that are not only caused by new technologies, but by changes to business models, in order to understand the challenges that companies face in terms of discontinuities.

Theme 3: Green Business Innovation

This theme focuses on the development of new innovative capabilities of a firm facing a qualitatively new competitive situation driven by the rapid move into an eco-constrained world.

The underlying challenge is how to make profit in such a world where there is a seemingly ‘contradiction in terms’ between common good and private good?

From a business perspective, the innovation challenges lie both in understanding and translating the challenges into opportunities as well as being able to successfully redirect innovation efforts. In other words: to be proactive and exploit these new prerequisites that are the flip side of environmental problems.

Although the perceived urgency for change has increased considerably on the societal level, less has happened actually, this far, on company and consumer levels.

The theme has as a central point that the path to be and become at the same time sustainable and profitable is rather an organizational and managerial (mental) issue than a technological.

The overall aim of the theme is therefore to create actionable knowledge around innovative capabilities. And to develop tools for strengthening the innovative capabilities in the special situation of eco-innovation and its inherent change of prerequisites.