Financial innovation is often blamed for having landed the global economy in a mess, but it has also been said that innovation will get us out of the present downturn. Still, companies can be forgiven for feeling that spending time and money thinking about the “next big thing” is a frivolous exercise. After all, every dollar counts these days, and CEOs and their executive teams are busy enough just getting their companies through the day-to-day demands of the recession.

It needn’t be that way, according to Christian Terwiesch and Karl Ulrich . As the two Wharton professors of operations and information management point out in their new book, Innovation Tournaments: Creating and Selecting Exceptional Opportunities , if done with greater focus, identifying new opportunities shouldn’t be seen as a luxury, but a necessity. They note that creativity and process-driven rigor can actually go hand in hand when it comes to vetting and managing new ideas.…