Within the context of the large established organization, breakthrough ideas are frequently lost. This article details describes how breakthrough innovations are captured through opportunity recognition. It is based on evidence from a six-year long study of twelve radical innovation projects in ten large U.S. firms. The article highlights inefficiencies in current managerial processes and provides examples of organizational structures, mechanisms, and roles directed at reducing these inefficiencies. It presents a set of approaches for improving opportunity recognition capabilities and identifies several mechanisms for senior management to encourage "radical innovation" people and processes

Management tools such as strategic planning, benchmarking, pay-for-performance, outsourcing, customer segmentation, reengineering, balanced scorecard, and total quality management garner considerable attention in the popular management literature. Companies throughout the world spend millions of dollars each year implementing a dozen or so of these tools. This survey examines the usage of these tools over a seven-year period, assesses user satisfaction with the tools, and attempts to correlate tool usage with company performance. It identifies tools that have been consistently used over time as well as those that seem to have been passing fads