ENT 588 Week 1 Leading Innovation Example

Making Room for New Ideas: Leading Innovation at a Colorado Outdoor Apparel Company

[Student Name]

University of Phoenix

ENT/588: Innovation and Design: Capstone Project

Week 1 Assignment

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

Timberline Outfitters, its leaders, teams and figures are composites written for a model paper.

Timberline Outfitters, a composite company, designs and sells technical outdoor apparel, jackets, base layers and packs, from its headquarters in Denver. It employs about 600 people, sells through its own stores, its website and outdoor retailers and had revenue of about $310 million last year. Its products regularly win industry awards for durability and fit, and its brand is well known among serious hikers and climbers. But revenue has barely moved in three years, and younger customers increasingly buy used gear or rent it for trips. Two competitors launched resale and repair programs in the past two years that attract new customers and steady media attention. Timberline's chief executive asked the leadership team why the company keeps improving products but has launched no new business in eight years. This paper examines the leadership side of that question.

Types of Innovation

Innovation can change products, processes or business models. Timberline excels at incremental product innovation: each season brings lighter fabrics and better zippers. It has done little process innovation outside manufacturing and no business model innovation, such as new ways to deliver and charge for value. The competitive threat now comes from business models, resale, rental and repair, rather than from better jackets.

How Leaders Shape Creativity

Amabile et al. (2004) studied project teams over several months and found that leader behaviors, such as monitoring work in supportive ways, giving clear feedback, recognizing good work and consulting team members, were associated with team members' perceptions of leader support and with their creativity, while negative behaviors, such as checking up harshly or ignoring input, undermined it. How a leader responds to a half-formed idea on a given day can encourage or shut down creative work.

Hunter and Cushenbery (2011) reviewed research on leading for innovation and distinguished direct influences, such as leaders generating and evaluating ideas themselves, from indirect influences, such as shaping climate, allocating resources and setting goals. They noted that leaders affect innovation most through the conditions they create for others.

Ambidextrous Leadership

Rosing et al. (2011) reviewed studies of leadership and innovation and found inconsistent results for broad leadership styles. They proposed ambidextrous leadership: leaders use opening behaviors that increase variance, such as encouraging experimentation and tolerating errors, and closing behaviors that reduce variance, such as setting routines and monitoring goals, and switch flexibly between them depending on the stage of innovation. Exploration needs opening behaviors; execution needs closing ones.

Why Successful Firms Struggle

Christensen (1997) explained why well-managed, successful firms often fail to respond to disruptive innovations: their resource allocation processes favor sustaining improvements for existing customers, while new models initially offer lower margins and serve different customers, so they look unattractive. Resale and rental fit that pattern for Timberline. Each used jacket sold may displace a new one, early margins are uncertain and the customers are not the loyal enthusiasts who buy Timberline's premium gear today.

Every reason Timberline's leaders give for not starting a resale program is a reason a good manager of the existing business would give.

Assessing Timberline

Interviews with 15 managers and a review of two years of meeting records and budgets produced a clear picture of current leadership practices.

Leader responses to ideas. Several product designers described proposing a repair service, only to have it dismissed in meetings as off-brand. One said, "Ideas that don't fit next season's line don't go anywhere."

Closing behaviors dominate. Planning, cost control and on-time launches are strong; managers are evaluated almost entirely on margins and launch dates, and meetings focus on variances from plan.

Opening behaviors are rare. There is no time or budget for experiments outside the product calendar, and a failed 2019 online customization pilot is still cited as a reason not to try new models.

Resource allocation. All innovation spending flows through the product development budget, judged by first-year margin.

What the Customers Are Saying

Leadership blind spots show up in customer data too. Timberline's own surveys show that customers under 35 rate its products highly but buy less often than older customers, and about a third say they bought used outdoor gear in the past year. Online reviews increasingly ask whether Timberline offers repairs. The chief marketing officer noted that these signals were reported to leadership twice in two years without a response, because no one owned the question of new business models. Information about the opportunity was available; the leadership system had no place to act on it.

The Leader's Own Habits

The chief executive acknowledged in an interview that he usually asks first what an idea will cost and how it fits the line, questions that close discussion before an idea is explored. He agreed to try a different opening: asking what a team has learned and what it would test next, and holding cost questions until an idea has evidence behind it. Small changes in how senior leaders respond to ideas signal to the organization what kind of thinking is welcome.

Exploit and Explore at the Same Time

The goal is not to weaken Timberline's strength in disciplined product development. The core business funds everything else and still needs closing behaviors: deadlines, quality standards and margin targets. The exploration team needs opening behaviors and different measures. Separating the two, while connecting them at the top through the chief executive, lets each operate in the mode it needs.

Recommendations

Create a small exploration team with a protected two-year budget of $1.5 million, reporting to the chief executive, separate from the product calendar.

Coach senior leaders in opening behaviors: asking questions before judging ideas, framing failed tests as learning and recognizing experiments publicly.

Change incentives so a portion of leaders' bonuses reflects learning milestones in new ventures, not only margins.

Hold quarterly innovation reviews where teams present experiments and results to the full leadership team, including what failed and why.

How Progress Will Be Judged

Within a year, leaders should see more ideas reaching the exploration team, at least three experiments run with customers, and a measurable shift in how managers describe leaders' responses to ideas in the annual engagement survey. These signs would show whether the leadership changes are taking hold before any new business is launched.

The Capstone Challenge

The capstone will address one central, practical question: how could Timberline build a circular gear program, combining repair, resale and rental, that attracts new customers and extends product life without undermining its premium brand? Later weeks will apply design thinking with customers, prototype and test the program, compare financing options, plan scaling and present a proposal.

Conclusion

Timberline's leaders are skilled at running the existing business but rarely open space for new models. Research on leader support, ambidextrous leadership and disruptive innovation explains why and points to changes in behavior, structure and incentives. The circular gear challenge will test whether those changes can produce a new business.

References

Amabile, T. M., Schatzel, E. A., Moneta, G. B., & Kramer, S. J. (2004). Leader behaviors and the work environment for creativity: Perceived leader support. The Leadership Quarterly, 15(1), 5-32. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.leaqua.2003.12.003

Christensen, C. M. (1997). The innovator's dilemma: When new technologies cause great firms to fail. Harvard Business School Press.

Hunter, S. T., & Cushenbery, L. (2011). Leading for innovation: Direct and indirect influences. Advances in Developing Human Resources, 13(3), 248-265. https://doi.org/10.1177/1523422311424263

Rosing, K., Frese, M., & Bausch, A. (2011). Explaining the heterogeneity of the leadership-innovation relationship: Ambidextrous leadership. The Leadership Quarterly, 22(5), 956-974. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.leaqua.2011.07.014