Skip to Main Content
HBS Home
  • About
  • Academic Programs
  • Alumni
  • Faculty & Research
  • Baker Library
  • Giving
  • Harvard Business Review
  • Initiatives
  • News
  • Recruit
  • Map / Directions
Faculty & Research
  • Faculty
  • Research
  • Featured Topics
  • Academic Units
  • …→
  • Harvard Business School→
  • Faculty & Research→
Publications
Publications
  • March 2006
  • Module Note

Managing Innovation in an Uncertain World: Module 4: Sensing Opportunity

By: Alan D. MacCormack
  • Format:Print
  • | Pages:34
ShareBar

Abstract

Describes the fourth module of the 30-session Harvard Business School elective course Managing Innovation in an Uncertain World. The course helps students understand the challenges that uncertainty implies for innovation and how to overcome them. The course emphasizes multiple levels of analysis--from creating and executing development projects to building and balancing portfolios of projects to assessing and selecting future opportunities for development--showing how to align these activities to face uncertainties and take advantage of the opportunities they present. Allows students to respond the situations from multiple perspectives and assume different roles--from project manager to CEO--to appreciate how various organizational roles themselves reflect these perspectives. The fourth module, Sensing Opportunity, focuses on how organizations manage opportunities for innovation in the future. A central theme is that in many environments, opportunities emerge and evolve in a dynamic and unpredictable manner. New possibilities may arise in locations far from a firm's existing focus and along dimensions not previously considered relevant. Hence, there is a need both to sense and to shape the evolution of the organization's innovation landscape, allowing what is unknown to come into view. (Students, having explored the dimensions of this landscape in the prior module, are primed for this perspective.) The module introduces a structured way to achieve this objective--in particular, through the design of so-called sensing networks, which scan the periphery of a firm's innovation landscape for important signals that demand attention. The materials motivate the need for such networks, demonstrate how they can be designed and managed, and highlight the mechanisms through which they create value.

Keywords

Innovation and Management; Problems and Challenges; Management Analysis, Tools, and Techniques; Projects; Opportunities; Risk and Uncertainty; Perspective; Value Creation; Networks; Alignment

Citation

MacCormack, Alan D. "Managing Innovation in an Uncertain World: Module 4: Sensing Opportunity." Harvard Business School Module Note 606-104, March 2006.
  • Purchase

About The Author

Alan D. MacCormack

Technology and Operations Management
→More Publications

More from the Author

    • November–December 2022
    • Harvard Business Review

    Your Company Needs a Space Strategy. Now.

    By: Matthew Weinzierl, Prithwiraj (Raj) Choudhury, Tarun Khanna, Alan MacCormack and Brendan Rosseau
    • June 2022
    • Faculty Research

    FIELD Immersion 2022: Salt Lake City, Utah

    By: Alan MacCormack and Kerry Herman
    • 2021
    • Faculty Research

    Computer-Implemented Methods and Systems for Measuring, Estimating, and Managing Economic Outcomes and Technical Debt in Software Systems and Projects: US Patent 11,126,427 B2

    By: Daniel J. Sturtevant, Carliss Baldwin, Alan MacCormack, Sunny Ahn and Sean Gilliland
More from the Author
  • Your Company Needs a Space Strategy. Now. By: Matthew Weinzierl, Prithwiraj (Raj) Choudhury, Tarun Khanna, Alan MacCormack and Brendan Rosseau
  • FIELD Immersion 2022: Salt Lake City, Utah By: Alan MacCormack and Kerry Herman
  • Computer-Implemented Methods and Systems for Measuring, Estimating, and Managing Economic Outcomes and Technical Debt in Software Systems and Projects: US Patent 11,126,427 B2 By: Daniel J. Sturtevant, Carliss Baldwin, Alan MacCormack, Sunny Ahn and Sean Gilliland
ǁ
Campus Map
Harvard Business School
Soldiers Field
Boston, MA 02163
→Map & Directions
→More Contact Information
  • Make a Gift
  • Site Map
  • Jobs
  • Harvard University
  • Trademarks
  • Policies
  • Accessibility
  • Digital Accessibility
Copyright © President & Fellows of Harvard College