... is where businesses and universities can share and supplement each other's contribution to innovation in management. The BMIL will also create a space for mutual trust to develop and people can learn to trust one another. The BMIL is being applied to Burundi challenges such as deforestation, habitat loss, poverty, corruption, instability, illiteracy, and food insecurity, to improve decision making while mitigating conditions. Management innovation in the BMIL can also be leveraged to inspire new levels of trust between combatants and adversaries by addressing core issues while considering a wider array of alternative solutions in order to resolve global conflicts.
The flux in the current business environment is a challenge to the sustainability of technology-driven innovations, the subsequent competitive strategies, and the business schools that train managers. The turbulent environment eroded the fantasy of control and stability granted by technocratic MBA programs and their subsequent tyrannical and rigid administrative structures.
Technology advancements opened everyone to rich, strategic, and instantaneous information while outdating the predictive odds of competitive strategies. Management Innovation (MI) sparked cooperative strategy that assumes uncertainty, ambiguity, and complexity as a new management paradigm.
In the ill-equipped innovation culture of universities and their omniscient professors, who transmit unchallenged knowledge to passive students, they unintentionally and systematically inhibit the emergence of management innovation. There are dying intellectual habits of critical and constructive debates that dictatorship and administrative professors impose on universities.
Raising management innovators within our current organizations requires universities and industry to invest in efforts to mutually strengthening the management innovation ecosystem that guarantees a psychologically safe space for transparent management practice and honest management research.
Among the critical contributions, business schools ought to raise critical thinkers and self-aware management innovators who recognize their inherent limitations while valuing the contributions from their teams. This Management Innovation Lab serves this purpose and is an expression of the continuously interactive Management Innovation ecosystem.
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triggering and sustaining management innovation and make them priority number one for all actors
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intellectual honesty, more consultative, and less bureaucratic structures, as an enabling environment for fearless management at the edge of chaos
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technology-focused innovation forms that give no value to the unlimited creative ability and human potential
This is an innovation in management thinking (new idea generation through research) and practice (new ways in how managers do what they do) aimed at producing dramatic shifts in competitive advantage through meeting the conditions of novel principles that challenges management orthodoxy, being systemic as encompassing a range of processes and methods and serving as part of an ongoing program of invention where progress compounds over time.
Management innovation is special because of its focus on complex and systemic sphere involving entire organizations instead of specialized departments, thus underpinning the role of teams. As such, management innovation is the foundation of an organization-wide innovation that involves permanent generation of new, novel, and purposeful ideas through constantly enabled hotspots around the industry disruptive development while unlocking dynamic capability sparked by vision-centered team.
Management innovators are management renegades because of their open-mindedness that leads them to constantly commit to big problems intended to disrupt management foundations through exemplary display of intellectual honesty and transparent management, urging them to alternate between decisive actions and emotional conviction.
In essence, competitive strategy is about creating and sustaining mutually exclusive relationships between competitors by systematically adopting differentiated business models, products, and unsurpassed technologies. The vignette of management innovation as a competitive strategy resides in competing on flat organizational structures allowing management innovators to exercise different styles in setting directions, making decisions, coordinating activities, and motivating people, driven by radical decentralization of decision making, prominence of innovative ideas, and experimentation through beta products, widespread and easy experiments free from consequences for disastrous attempts, and honest engagement in interactive problem-solving discussions and exchange information across hierarchical levels and monitoring.
The BMIL is space where management renegades and corporate rebels put their capacity with the intent of disrupting and advancing the management field through fearless exploration of the edge of management thinking and practice, giving to everyone the opportunity to learn and innovate by motivating and mobilizing teams to challenge bureaucratic and hierarchical structures and ridding them from following predefined mindset and models while readying them to migration.
One of the concerns about vertically hierarchical organizations and societies is that individuals in them, whether in academia or private businesses, have no or too little incentives to challenge organizational structures with new ideas. Bureaucracy as the foundation of hierarchical structures excels in maintaining order and control through tyrannical and absolute hierarchical organizational structures, as defined by Max Weber as ideal type of legitimate domination. but which turned to ruin the unlimited human capability needed in unpredictable environment.
From the perspective of management innovation, the capacity to sustain organization-wide generation of innovative, useful, and purposeful ideas underpinning management innovation, resides in educating critical thinking managers equipped with the capacity of leveraging organizational team instead of formula-principled and powerful managers. Thinkers and professionals all agree that the long-held education systems have become narrow, partial, almost obsolete, and inappropriate for the 21st century’s organizational problems, and deeply destructive of the unlimited human potential and its creative ability. Only through management education transformation from teaching for management to teaching about management depends the future of organizations that are consistently creative and entrepreneurial which are at the heart of management innovation challenges.
