Diffusion in the Face of Failure: The Evolution of a Management Innovation

Recent work has questioned the institutional model of management innovation by highlighting interactions between the field‐level actors engaged in diffusing innovations and implementation of the innovation at organization level. Focusing on the adaptation of management innovations to their context, rather than their creation, we review this work and use it to analyse the global diffusion of resource planning (RP), counter posing this case with the widely studied example of total quality management. Both of these innovations experienced a high level of failure when implemented by organizations. Total quality management's diffusion was characterized by a ‘boom and bust’ cycle. RP, however, has continued to spread globally in the form of its variants: MRP, MRPII and ERP. Our analysis seeks to account for the long‐run diffusion of RP through a processual model which highlights the interplay between RP's discursive framing at field level, the affordances of the innovation itself and its adaptation within organizations. This demonstrates how objectifying RP in software not only helped to spread the innovation but also allowed field‐level actors to differentiate its development as a successful innovation from the many failures experienced by organizations attempting to adapt it.     

Generations in organizations

Despite a rich tradition of scholarship across many disciplines, organizational research on the topic of generations has been relatively scarce. In this article we develop a framework for studying generations in organizations that draws on multiple conceptualizations across multiple disciplines. Our framework distills two distinct critical elements that give ‘generations’ agency in organizational settings – chronology (the idea that a unique location in time creates a ‘generation’) and genealogy (the idea that generations are linked through the transmission/descent of ideas/values/skills/knowledge). After an historic overview of the evolution of the topic of generations, we review generational research across the fields of political sociology, family sociology, psychology, social anthropology, cultural sociology, demography, and gerontology. Our framework elucidates how linkages between generations, based on chronology and genealogy, can be characterized in organizations and how the nature of intergenerational contact and transfer predicts a wide range of organizational outcomes such as change/innovation, conflict, turnover, and socialization. We outline the implications of this framework for future research on generations in organizations.     

Brokering knowledge: Linking learning and innovation

This paper presents a model of innovation, knowledge brokering, that explains how some organizations are able to routinely innovate by recombining their past knowledge in new ways. While existing theories of organizational learning and innovation are useful, the links between them are crucial for understanding how existing knowledge becomes the raw materials from which individuals in organizations construct innovative solutions. This model develops these links by grounding processes of learning and innovation in the larger social context within which they occur. Using a microsociological perspective, this article draws together research spanning levels of analysis to explain innovation as the dissembling and reassembling of extant ideas, artifacts, and people. Previous research has suggested that firms spanning multiple domains may innovate by moving ideas from where they are known to where they are not, in the process creating new combinations of existing ideas. This paper more fully develops this process by linking the cognitive, social, and structural activities it comprises. Knowledge brokering involves exploiting the preconditions for innovation that reside within the larger social structure by bridging multiple domains, learning about the resources within those domains, linking that knowledge to new situations, and finally building new networks around the innovations that emerge from the process. This article also considers the origins of knowledge brokers as firms committed to this innovation strategy, the structural and cultural supports for the knowledge brokering process, and several obstacles to the process that these firms experience. Finally, I discuss the implications of this model for further research on innovation and learning, and the implications for other organizations seeking to establish their own capabilities for brokering knowledge.     

The Conflict between U.S. Patent Protection and Technological Innovation: Analysis and Problem Solving by Means of the Integrated Causal Model for Innovated Ethic

Criticisms of patent laws for technological innovations in the United States reveal a multifaceted milieu of problems centered around the protection of short‐term economic gain and individual property rights. In this article, we consider this a conflict between current patent laws and the innovation capabilities of organizations. We propose a solution that enables the company to assure its long‐term survival in the face of these restrictions. This presumes that the firm will at least maintain its innovation capacities while preserving the company's ethical values and those of its social environment. We offer a theoretical model that is designed to help managers and policymakers reorient their governance strategies for managing the innovation process, using the “ethics of responsibility,” which establishes the link to individual moral values at the beginning of a governance process as well as the consequences of a decision. Our integrated causal model of ethical innovation for patents is presented and implications for global organizations and possible solutions for patent law process failure are offered.     

It’s time to sober up: The direct costs,side effects and long-term consequences of creativity and innovation

The literatures on creativity and innovation are each premised on the same important assumption that has gone largely unquestioned: Creativity and innovation are outcomes that are almost inherently positive. Decades of research on creativity in organizations have been motivated by the assumption that creative ideas can be implemented to realize innovations that will inevitably increase profit, strengthen competitive advantage and ensure firm survival. The assumption that creativity and innovation have positive downstream consequences has constrained existing research by forcing a myopic focus on creativity and innovation as dependent variables. Thus, in a significant departure from the existing literature, we turn the tables to conceptualize creativity and innovation as independent variables that can have a sweeping and frequently negative impact on a wide range of other important outcomes. We conclude by calling for a new stream of research to more soberly evaluate the direct costs, side effects and long-term consequences of creativity and innovation.     

Employment Relationships and Firm Innovation: The Double Role of Human Capital

We examine how employment relationships and human capital influence innovation in a sample of Spanish firms. Previous research has indicated that human capital directly affects innovation, but few studies have considered human capital as a variable that mediates or moderates the effects of other variables on innovation. We tested our hypotheses using a sample of 150 innovative Spanish firms and confirmed that, while human capital favours innovations, employment relationships are not directly associated with innovation unless they take human capital into account. Specifically, our analyses suggest that human capital mediates the relationship between a mutual investment employment relationship and innovation, which is characterized by high levels of incentives and expectations. However, we also found that human capital plays a moderating role when organizations develop an employment relationship characterized by low investments in personnel but high expectations from their work (the underinvestment model). We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of these results.     

Explaining the heterogeneity of the leadership-innovation relationship: Ambidextrous leadership

The authors review and meta-analytically integrate the existing literature on leadership and innovation to show a complex and inconsistent picture of this relationship. Current research has mostly neglected the complex nature of innovation processes that leads to changing requirements within these processes. The main requirements of innovation are exploration and exploitation as well as a flexibility to switch between those two activities. The authors propose an ambidexterity theory of leadership for innovation that specifies two complementary sets of leadership behavior that foster exploration and exploitation in individuals and teams — opening and closing leader behaviors, respectively. We call this ambidextrous leadership because it utilizes opening and closing leader behaviors and switches between them to deal with the ever-changing requirements of the innovation process. Routes to ambidextrous leadership and opportunities for future research on leadership and innovation are discussed.     

Explaining ambidextrous leadership in the aerospace and defense organizations

Researchers have increasingly been using the term of organizational ambidexterity to denote the simultaneous use of exploration and exploitation in organizations. Exploration refers to innovation, whereas exploitation addresses cost efficiency. However, despite the plethora of research output on ambidexterity, very few studies are actually providing insights into what specific behaviors and leadership styles accomplish ambidexterity and how organizational constraints influence ambidextrous leadership. In this research, we aim to explain the key properties of ambidextrous leadership, where we propose that ambidexterity is most efficiently promoted by ambidextrous leaders who combine two leadership styles: transformational leadership and transactional leadership. In our study, we associate transformational leadership to exploration, whereas transactional leadership is linked to exploitation. We conduct a research on ambidextrous leadership in the aerospace and defense organizations while also taking into account how organizational structure and environmental dynamism impact leadership styles. The results of our research reveal that both leadership styles are present at the senior management level. Top management, however, mostly uses transactional leadership in part because of structural and environmental constraints while also employing some limited form of transformational leadership style. Therefore, our study concludes that in this particular field the ambidextrous leaders are primarily focused on exploitative activities, while only a limited amount of their time is being allocated on exploration-oriented objectives.     

The dynamics of local and interactive effects on innovation adoption: The case of electronic commerce

Innovation adoption is determined not only by the opportunities and constraints resulting from organizations’ characteristics (local effects), but also by reaction to the adoption of their interdependent and referable others (interactive effects). This study examines the dynamics of innovation adoption by considering both local and interactive effects in early adopters relative to later adopters, and then investigates the electronic commerce adoption as an empirical example. Analysis results show that the crucial stimulating effects in the early market are focused on the nature of innovations, while those in the later market are concentrated on the practical implementation issues of innovations.     

Phases of the Adoption of Innovation in Organizations: Effects of Environment,Organization and Top Managers1

Multidimensional empirical examinations of the adoption of innovations in organizations, and the influence of factors within each dimension on the phases of adoption, are scarce. This study examines the effects of environmental, organizational and top managers' characteristics on the initiation, adoption decision and implementation of innovation. Using a sample of approximately 1200 public organizations in the United States, we found that while each dimension accounts for unique variance in the adoption of innovation, organizational characteristics and top managers' attitudes toward innovation have a stronger influence than environmental and top managers' demographic characteristics. We also found no difference in the direction of effects of any antecedent, but did find differences in the significance of effects of several antecedents, on the phases of innovation adoption. We discuss the implications of these findings and suggest ideas for future research.     

Nurturing life-science knowledge discovery: managing multi-organisation networks

Advancement of knowledge is the seed of the innovation process. As innovations have become more complex, organisations are driven by an increased need to collaborate in order to combine specialist capabilities to meet emerging market needs. The life sciences are one sector where collaborative innovation is highly evident. This article examines the phenomenon of knowledge-generating networks within the life sciences. The study explores the drivers of collaborative endeavours and investigates how knowledge networks linking the capabilities of public research centres and commercially focused pharmaceutical organisations can be managed to deliver the required synergistic benefits for partnering organisations. Three case studies of functioning university–industry knowledge networks are analysed and a model reflecting their network's life-cycle phases is presented. The discussion identifies the specific challenge posed at each of the network's development stages, together with the management process required to secure sustainable knowledge creation and effective transfer of this knowledge into innovation-generating R&D.     

Innovative activity in small businesses: Competitive context and organization level

The effect of market type and product technology on innovation was studied using data from 3800 employees in 88 small businesses. Results demonstrate that: (1) organizational context effects on innovative activity are significant at administrative and strategic levels, (2) organizational members in consumer markets initiate more innovations but implement fewer than organizational members in industrial markets, (3) members of service-providing organizations report less innovative activity than those in goods-producing organizations, and (4) operative level employees appear to play a small role in the innovation process.     

The impact of external,internal, and dual relational embeddedness on the innovation performance of foreign subsidiaries: Evidence from a developing country

As parts of a global network, foreign-owned subsidiaries enjoy privileged access to knowledge sources both internal (within their multinational group) and external (involving other organizations in the host location), and this has proven especially relevant in their assumption of greater creative responsibilities that increase the technological capabilities of their multinational group. This study investigates whether external and internal relational embeddedness are mutually reinforcing (complementary) or whether they act separately in explaining superior innovation performance of foreign-owned subsidiaries in terms of a greater propensity to obtain radical innovations. The empirical analysis uses both direct and indirect tests to evaluate the complementarity, as well as a rich firm-level panel data on foreign subsidiaries, extracted from a census of Colombian manufacturing firms for the period 2008–2014. Our findings reveal that external relational embeddedness in isolation (without internal embeddedness) has a positive impact on performance only in terms of incremental innovation, while internal embeddedness alone (without external embeddedness) has no effect on the innovation performance of subsidiaries. However, we find that a complementary and dynamic relationship exists between external and internal linkages to spur radical innovation outcomes, which in turn are related to the competence-creating roles in foreign subsidiaries as prior literature has shown.     

Innovation in organizations

Innovation and growth are often regarded as mutually independent conditions for healthy business. Indeed, many regard the important process of innovation as being a necessary condition, although not sufficient, for a business to grow. However, the author claims that we know little about the concept of innovation and that much of the discussion of it lacks precision. this paper examines the concept of innovation, who performs it, and tends to place its importance within an organizational context.

This paper examines the development of an idea into an innovation and the important processes of screening which have to be undertaken in order to ensure that innovatory ideas which are relevant to a company can be developed and those which are likely to fail, can be rejected. Furthermore, the importance of recognizing the full implications of innovatory ideas is also examined and the author claims that many product failures are due to incomplete partial innovation. but finally, a company which it is claimed, has organized itself to encourage innovative new products is examined and the organizational structure and its relationship to innovation is explained.     

The dynamic componential model of creativity and innovation in organizations: Making progress,making meaning

Leveraging insights gained through a burgeoning research literature over the past 28 years, this paper presents a significant revision of the model of creativity and innovation in organizations published in Research in Organizational Behavior in 1988. This update focuses primarily on the individual-level psychological processes implicated in creativity that have been illuminated by recent research, and highlights organizational work environment influences on those processes. We revisit basic assumptions underlying the 1988 model, modify certain components and causal connections, and introduce four new constructs into the model: (1) a sense of progress in creative idea development; (2) the meaningfulness of the work to those carrying it out; (3) affect; and (4) synergistic extrinsic motivation. Throughout, we propose ways in which the components underlying individual and team creativity can both influence and be influenced by organizational factors crucial to innovation.     

Entrepreneurial leadership vision in nonprofit vs. for-profit organizations

This paper explores the role that entrepreneurial leadership vision plays in the entrepreneurial process of nonprofit and for-profit ventures. The results indicate significant differences in the meaning of vision articulated for each type of venture. Differences between ventures were also found with regard to the relationship that vision has with the ventures' strategies and performance. In the nonprofit organizations vision was associated with a wide-range strategy as well as the ventures' performance and growth. In addition, wide-range strategy partially mediated the relationship between the ventures' vision and its performance and growth. In business enterprises, vision directly predicted only a differentiation strategy, which also mediated the relationship between vision and the ventures' performance and growth. In contrast, a wide-range strategy in these organizations actually reduced growth. These findings contribute both to the literature on vision as well as to the literature on entrepreneurship.     

Building global dynamic capabilities through innovation: A case study of Taiwan's cultural organizations

This case study analyzes global dynamic capabilities, firm specific advantages (FSAs), and the international expansion of cultural enterprises in Taiwan from the viewpoint of sustainable development. From our exploratory study, we identify six global dynamic capabilities as the driving forces behind the creation of new cultural products that revitalize a company through continuous innovation. Each global dynamic capability actually leverages the company's resources. The case study results show that technology-based FSAs help cultural organizations globalize their business and create value. There are two global expansion paths that cultural organizations can take to increase value which are discussed in our paper.     

A conceptual framework of the adoption of innovations in organizations: a meta-analytical review of the literature

Journal of Management and Governance - Studies on the adoption of innovations in organizations are abundant and have introduced many different factors that are likely to influence adoption...     

探索式创新、利用式创新与绩效:战略和环境的影响

本文基于397家中国企业的样本数据,对探索式创新、利用式创新与企业绩效之间的关系进行了实证研究,着重考察了探索式创新、利用式创新的内部匹配关系以及这两类创新行为与企业战略和环境的外部匹配关系。结果表明,两类创新行为分别对企业绩效有直接的正向影响,两类创新行为之间的内部匹配对绩效无显著影响,两类创新行为与企业战略和环境竞争性的外部匹配关系对绩效有显著影响。     

变革型领导对R&D团队创新绩效的影响机制研究

R&D团队是企业技术创新的重要组织形式.本研究从变革型领导这一视角探讨了其对R&D团队创新绩效的影响及中介机制.本文运用结构方程模型方法,通过对316个R&D团队样本的实证研究发现,R&D团队领导者的变革型领导风格对团队创新绩效有积极影响,而知识分享与知识整合正是这种影响的中介机制.