Van Idee naar Impact

Organisations often find it hard to stay entrepreneurial and innovative. This lecture is about why that is, and what managers can do about it.

Living in a World of Change

We begin with two contrasts: the competition between Dutch department stores, several of which did not survive, and the way Amazon organises for innovation. Against that we set the global trends expected to shape the coming years, and ask which of them the organisations our students are about to visit will have to deal with.

Entrepreneurship

Entrepreneurship is venturing practice: creating value by combining opportunities with resources. We examine causal versus effectual reasoning, and place a range of organisations on the entrepreneurial spectrum, from BP and the WWF to Brownies & Downies and Patagonia. Students vote on where each belongs, and the disagreement is the point.

The Timmons model of the entrepreneurial process and the business venture lifecycle show how ideas become ventures through opportunity recognition, resource mobilisation, and team formation.

Innovation

Innovation is the process of creating, using, and spreading novelty. The central concept here is ambidexterity: the ability to exploit existing strengths and explore new opportunities at the same time. We work through the differences between exploration and exploitation, the innovation funnel, open innovation, and the dynamics of adoption and diffusion, illustrated with the Philips Senseo and Baristina.

We distinguish four types of innovation, product, marketing, process, and organisational, and close with social innovation: tackling societal needs by creating new relationships across organisational and sectoral boundaries.

Preparing for the Company Visit

The final part of the lecture prepares students for the visit itself: how to use the survey and the interview protocol, and what to do before you walk in the door.

Required Readings

• Laasch, O. (2024). Principles of Business & Management: Practicing Ethics, Responsibility, Sustainability (3rd ed.). Chapter 14: Innovating.
• Laasch, O. (2024). Chapter 15: Entrepreneuring.

About the Course

This lecture is part of Inleiding Verantwoordelijke Organisatie, a first-year course in the BSc in Business Administration at Radboud University. The course examines how organisations create social, environmental, and economic value, and introduces the three dimensions of professional management: ethics, responsibility, and sustainability.

Alongside the lectures, students work in teams on the Young Innovators Project with the regional network organisation Lifeport MKB: each team researches an organisation in the Nijmegen region, visits it, and reports on what it found.