Product and service innovations are the result of mutually interacting creative and coordination tasks within a system that has to balance technical decisions, marketplace taste, personnel management, and stakeholder commitment. The constituent elements of such systems are often scattered across multiple firms and across the globe and constitute a complex system consisting of many interacting parts.

In the spirit of the "butterfly effect," metaphorically describing the sensitivity to initials conditions of chaotic systems, this book builds an argument that "innovation butterflies" can,...