Several authors have described partial solutions. Tushman & O'Reilly urge managers to create organizations with separate units pursuing incremental change in the existing business model on one hand and transformational change on the other. Brown & Eisenhardt urge managers to keep their firms on the "edge of chaos" through "improvisation, coadaptation, regeneration, experimentation, and time-pacing". But managers can be forgiven if they wonder just how to apply these ideas to the particular problems of their own firms.

Our research suggests that for thoughtful managers, however, discovering and launching a powerful series of effective new strategies doesn't have to be quite as difficult as it now seems. A key part of the problem is that different kinds of innovation problems call for different kinds of solutions. That difficulty, however, points to an important part of the solution. Just a few different styles of strategy innovation seem to solve innovation problems in the most successful firms. Managers seeking excellent new strategies, then, need to take two crucial steps. First, they need to decide which of these styles are appropriate for the opportunities before them. And second, they need to ensure that they are doing the right things to implement the styles they've chosen.

Over the past three years we've studied two dozen successful innovators in detail - companies that had introduced numerous successful new strategies - and compared them to less innovative peers. We asked what allows some companies to innovate more effectively than others. We did find that successful innovators had a good deal in common. For example, almost all successful innovators have big aspirations, a flexible definition of their business, and a habit of experimentation.

But what was especially striking - and most immediately useful for managers - was how the innovation processes in these successful companies differed from each other. We found five distinct management styles, often at odds with one another, and each included internally consistent routines capable of creating tremendous innovation breakthroughs repeatedly. Each addresses different kinds of innovation problems and requires that managers utilize a different set of levers. For each of the styles, we have developed a metaphorical name that summarizes its distinct characteristics.

1. The Cauldron. In this style, perhaps the most entrepreneurial and demanding, leaders catalyze the entrepreneurial energy of the entire management team so the group repeatedly challenges everything about the organization. The team constantly rethinks its business models and rapidly creates new models for both existing and new businesses. This approach results in rapid change throughout the organization. Enron and (especially during the period when it was being spun off from AT&T) Lucent Technologies' networking businesses are each examples of boiling Cauldrons of innovation.

2. The Spiral Staircase. Here managers innovate so consistently and so often in their existing business that, over time, they repeatedly change its very nature. Just as a circular staircase takes you upward without much changing your latitude or longitude, a Spiral Staircase innovator rises dramatically in its chosen business while seeming to stay in the same place. Examples have included Charles Schwab & Co., Toyota, and (sometimes) British Airways.

3. The Fertile Field. In this approach, managers focus on finding new uses for existing strategic assets and competencies, sowing them across a wide field that extends far beyond the company's existing operations. Emerson Electric, the St. Louis electrical equipment manufacturer, is an example, and so are GE Capital and NiSource, the holding company that includes Northern Indiana Public Service Co. in the U.S.

4. The PacMan. In this model the company effectively out-sources much strategy development and R&D to the marketplace, investing in startups and gobbling up those that prove themselves. Effective PacMan investors are not just gobbling up entrepreneurial startups to enjoy the fruits of their labors, however, but assembling coherent competencies for the future. Examples include Cisco in computer networking and WorldCom (now MCI WorldCom) in telecommunications.

5. The Explorer. Here a company sets out work in a big, poorly understood field where it knows it will labor for many years before seeing profits. It keeps its investments small at first, but achieves its goal through a series of relatively low-cost probes that progressively solve the problems that had prevented the innovation from happening. Examples include Motorola's development of cell phones from 1973 through 1984 and Monsanto's pursuit, from 1978 through 1995, of the technology that underlay its push to apply biotechnology to agri-business. (note: The style we describe as Explorer is also presented in Gary S. Lynn, Joseph G. Morone, and Albert S. Paulson, "Marketing and Discontinous Innovation: The Probe and Learn Process," California Management Review, Spring 1996, pp. 8-37.)

The choice of styles will depend on where you think opportunities for your firm lie. (See Quick Guide.) Many successful companies practice several styles. But each style represents an internally consistent approach to innovating that mobilizes a wide variety of people. Each involves a coordinated package of management techniques that nurture it. The levers management can utilize to promote successful strategy innovation differ dramatically depending on which style is being practiced. Levers that are perfect for one may actually block another. Thus companies that utilize several styles must generally separate the pursuit of one style from the pursuit of another, because the management systems that affect each have to differ.

Each of the styles mobilizes many people's brainpower for innovation. Some chief executives in less successful companies we studied sought to establish the organization's new strategies single-handed. Others delegated the task primarily to a corporate strategy group or relied on "expert" consultants to tell where the organization should go. In relatively simple industries, these approaches can work. (We saw examples of small groups at the top successfully setting strategy in the public utility and insurance industries.) But the five styles summarized above are far more powerful because they're each capable of applying the intelligence of far more people to the task of innovation.

Consider how each style works.