Cross-industry case studies: Insights from healthcare, finance, smart cities, and defense
Synopsis
In today's interconnected and competitive world, cross-industry knowledge transfer is vital for innovation, often yielding superior results to any organization. At the same time, organizations are increasingly called upon to foster inclusive innovation in order to embed fairness for economic and social impact. In this chapter, we provide a backdrop to discussion in the rest of the book, briefly describing our perspective on innovation as a business model design activity. We draw on a number of key, partially overlapping literatures - especially design, innovation, knowledge, sensemaking and business model - to illuminate how organizations can draw on the rich knowledge bases, reflexive practices and inclusive innovation action effects observable in other industries, people and the world around them. These literatures help us to model how the acts of design during the life of a business model can evoke a shared 'sense' of something greater than the individual, potentially transcending a singular industry character. Cross-industry transfer in micro-foundational terms, thus offers researchers and practitioners a heuristic for actively developing principles and practices that draw upon relational knowledge bases and inclusively innovative intent.