Abstract

The pace of innovation has been accelerating for decades, intensifying with the rise of artificial intelligence and proliferation of digital technologies. Mounting temporal pressure has ignited scholarly interest in how corporations accelerate innovation. Research suggests simply speeding up innovation processes often backfires, increasing costs through time compression diseconomies or forcing difficult tradeoffs between incremental and breakthrough innovation objectives (Dierickx and Cool, 1989; Levinthal and March, 1993; O'Reilly III and Tushman, 2008). Yet the mechanisms enabling successful acceleration, and the conditions under which speed helps versus harms, remain poorly understood. Panelists in this PDW showcase emerging research that challenges conventional wisdom about innovation speed: (1) structural frictions that impede breakthrough innovation, including capital barriers, disciplinary silos, and temporal investment biases that may favor fast-cycle over transformative long-cycle innovations; (2) equity markets constrain incumbents to incremental innovation; (3) time compression diseconomies and organizational mechanisms to mitigate escalating innovation costs; (4) where breakthrough ideas emerge in knowledge space - revealing that breakthroughs peak in "emerging" research lines that diverge from the past while staying connected to current work; and (5) paradoxical innovation processes that counterintuitively begin by slowing down and mapping constraint spaces before sharply accelerating. The session combines panelist presentations with interactive discussion, building toward a future research agenda exploring when acceleration catapults versus retards innovation outcomes, what organizational and temporal mechanisms enable successful acceleration, and how firms can navigate the fundamental tensions between speed and breakthrough potential.