In this book we address a central question in innovation management: how does an organization move from scattered initiatives that celebrate innovation to a sustained organizational capability to produce it? We follow the path of innovation from the first signal detected to a solution that is adopted in practice and creates value, and we examine what turns that path into an established organizational practice: strategy, systems, culture, governance, teams and measurement. Throughout, we place people at the center of all these building blocks, at a time when artificial intelligence is accelerating change.
Dr. Omar A. Alsamani
First edition, 1448 AH / 2026 · Legal deposit no. 1448/7324 · ISBN 978-603-06-7961-4 · Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
How to cite this book Alsamani, O. A. (2026). Innovation Management: From scattered initiatives to a sustained organizational capability. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23599033
PrefaceAbout this book
The word “innovation” now appears in plans, strategies, department names and awards, yet its presence has not always come with agreement on what it means. It may refer to creativity, new technology, improvement, entrepreneurship, or simply the launch of a new initiative. This breadth has a clear practical consequence: an organization that champions the rhetoric of innovation while lacking a shared understanding of what it means by it, and lacking a system that captures opportunities, tests them and turns them into value.
We start from the premise that innovation is a managerial and organizational capability that can be built, learned and improved. It is more than a seasonal exercise in collecting ideas, and too broad to be the remit of a single department. Innovation management is the way an organization sets its directions and identifies its opportunities, receives ideas and initiatives, tests its assumptions, allocates its resources, decides whether to continue, adjust or stop, and then moves successful solutions into operation and scale.
The book brings together two perspectives: that of management, which builds systems, structures and governance, and that of psychology, which studies the innovator: their characteristics, their motivation and what they need from their environment. Many organizations have spent on centres, platforms and programs that remained empty, because they were designed around outputs and overlooked the people who were supposed to innovate within them.
The principles we set out apply to government bodies, companies and nonprofit organizations alike, even though the meaning of “value” differs from one context to another. Most of the book’s examples, however, come from government bodies and universities, because this is the context we know closely and because its innovation challenges have received less attention in Arabic writing. We follow an extended university case across several chapters and then draw its threads together in Chapter 20 as an application of the book’s ideas as a whole. In doing so we draw on the international standards for innovation management (the ISO 56000 series) and the Oslo Manual, and on the literature of management and the psychology of creativity, reading all of this in light of the Saudi experience wherever possible.
The common thread
The chapters are organized around three pillars: the problem, which sets the direction, since innovation begins from a priority need that precedes ideas and guides them; people, who innovate through their motivation and needs; and the system, which connects people to the problem and turns effort into results. Value is realized when motivated people meet a clear problem within a system that enables them. A principle that recurs throughout the book links the first two pillars: leadership and the system define the “what” and the “why,” and people own the “how.”
Premises of the book
Innovation is an implemented outcome that creates value; a new idea alone is not enough to be called innovation.
The more accurate starting point is a signal, a need or a problem worth understanding; the idea is a hypothesis for a solution.
Innovation management begins with strategy and priority opportunities, before collecting ideas.
Uncertainty is a natural part of innovation, which is why learning and experimentation are the basis for decisions.
People are the core of the innovation system. Innovators have characteristics and needs, such as recognition, opportunity, deferred judgment, cognitive autonomy and meaning, and the success of the system depends on understanding them and building its processes around them.
A supportive culture is necessary, and it is completed by governance, funding, roles and measurement.
An initiative succeeds fully when its users adopt it, it is integrated into operations and it achieves what it was intended to achieve.
An innovation system is built from within, starting from the organization’s own strengths, needs and character, rather than by borrowing other organizations’ models and goals.
What an organization needs for innovation to become a sustained capability: strategy, system and architecture; the people it is built for, with their motivation, culture and teams; and the governance of its decisions.
First edition, 1448 AH / 2026 · Legal deposit no. 1448/7324 · ISBN 978-603-06-7961-4. Published under a Creative Commons licence (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0): it may be copied, distributed and shared for non-commercial educational and research purposes, with attribution to the author and without changes to the text.