Systems of organizational sensemaking for sustained product innovation (original) (raw)
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This paper leverages current thinking on organising for innovation to create new ideas on contingent organising for innovation. I argue that all successfully innovative organisations need to be built on the same higher-level principles of innovative organising, but the relative emphasis on which principles and how they are implemented will vary by game of innovation. I focus on four organising activities: defining the work that will be done, differentiating that work into coherent units, integrating those differentiated units, and controlling the whole system over time. I synthesise the literature into four principles of innovative organising: defining innovative work as professional practice; differentiating innovative work into domains of practice; integrating these domains via strategic sensemaking, and controlling the work with social rules. Finally, particular configurations of these principles are developed for various MINE games of innovation, based on the dynamics of each game.
Office Address: Rutgers Business School – Newark
Organizing for sustained product innovation in complex organizations; rethinking the organization of work, knowledge, and human relations to support innovation; innovation in service organizations; knowledge management; new product development; comprehension of unfamiliar markets and technologies; organizational adaptation and change management; interdepartmental collaboration, marketing -R&D interface.
Reimagining the Differentiation and Integration of Work for Sustained Product Innovation
Organization Science, 2001
This study describes the image of organizing that underlies a complex organization's ability to incorporate streams of innovation with continuing operations. I argue that a mechanistic organization archetype prevents people from seeing in their minds' eyes-from imagining-how to do the work of innovation organizationwide, but that theorists have failed to articulate an alternative to this archetype in its own terms. The study focuses on two elements of organizing: the differentiation and the integration of work. I build grounded theory for an alternate, innovative archetype of organizing by exploring the shared image of work differentiation and integration in twelve firms that vary in innovative ability. I find a fundamentally different image in innovative organizations that is centered on hands-on practice: People understand value creation as a long-term working relationship with customers, in which they apply the firm's skills to anticipate and solve customer problems. This practice is differentiated into distinct problems in value creation, each of which embodies the integral flow of work like a lateral slice, but which situates those problems in their own contexts. People understand themselves to be organized in an autonomous community of practice that takes charge of one of the problems. The communities of practice are integrated by standards for action: vivid, simple representations of value that frame work and that are reenacted in practice.
Since the 1980s, the management and organizations literature has grown substantially, turning over the years toward cognitive, discursive, and phenomenological perspectives. At the heart of this continued growth and its many turns is the matter of sensemaking. Construed narrowly, sensemaking describes the process whereby people notice and interpret equivocal events and coordinate a response to clarify what such events mean. More broadly, sensemaking offers a unique perspective on organizations. This perspective calls attention to how members of organizations reach understandings of their environment through verbal and embodied behaviors, how these understandings both enable and constrain their subsequent behavior, and how this subsequent behavior changes the environment in ways that necessitate new understandings. Whereas organizational psychology constructs typically fit most comfortably into a linear “boxes and arrows” paradigm, sensemaking highlights a recursive and ongoing process. Sense is never made in a lasting way: It is always subject to disruption and therefore must be continually re-accomplished. As a result, sensemaking is especially evident when equivocal events cause breakdowns in meaning. Such breakdowns render organizations incapable of answering two key questions: “What’s going on here?” and “What should we do about it?” Not coincidentally, such events—including crisis situations, strategic change episodes, firm formations and dissolutions, and new member socialization—are among the most pivotal events that occur in organizations. Sensemaking is therefore strongly implicated in organizational change, learning, and identity. Sensemaking can appear impenetrable to newcomers for precisely the same reason that it enables remarkably incisive analyses: the sensemaking perspective helps disrupt limiting rationality assumptions that are so often embedded in organizational theories. As such, sensemaking sensitizes scholars to counterintuitive aspects of organizational life. These aspects include how action in organizations often precedes understanding rather than following from it, how organizations are beset by a surplus of possible meanings rather than a scarcity of information, how retrospective thought processes often trump future-oriented ones, and how organizations help create the environments to which they must react. Nonetheless, despite these advances and insights, much remains to be learned about sensemaking as it relates to emotion and embodiment; as it occurs across individual, group, organizational, and institutional levels of analysis; and as it both shapes and is shaped by new technologies.
Journal of Engineering and Technology Management, 2004
We analyze the social networks of project managers in an R&D lab of a Fortune 500 company to investigate how the extent and type of centrality shapes managers' perceptions of the success or failure of six technologically innovative projects. Managers asymmetrically discuss success more than failure, and the type of centrality they have influences how they talk about success. Interpretive flexibility in the meaning of success occurs among more central managers who have access to more information through their network ties. Not only do social ties affect information access, but also shape managers' perspectives on the outcomes of innovative projects.
Journal of Engineering and Technology Management, 2007
Team learning is vital for organizations in order to compete in fast-paced environments. However, the ways learning can be effective in such environments warrents research, especially for teams developing new products under rapidly changing technological and market conditions. Interestingly, recent new product development (NPD) literature demonstrates the essential role of improvisation (i.e., planning and executing any action simultaneously) and unlearning (i.e., changes in team beliefs and project routines) for effective learning and performing under turbulent conditions. However, the combined effect of team improvisation and unlearning on new product success (NPS) has largely been ignored. This paper investigates the nomological relations among team improvisation and unlearning, new product success, and environmental turbulence, and contributes to the literature on NPD team learning, and on team flexibility under turbulent conditions. By examining 197 new product-development projects, we found that (1) environmental turbulence positively affects team unlearning, (2) team unlearning concurrently stimulates team improvisation, (3) team improvisation positively impacts new product success by utilizing/implementing new knowledge acquired by unlearning and improvisation. We further discuss the theoretical and managerial implications of our conclusions. # A.E. Akgün et al. / J. Eng. Technol. Manage. 24 (2007) 203-230 205
Innovation strategies of Asian firms in the United States
Journal of Engineering and Technology …, 2005
This paper examines the relationship between Asian firms' technological and non-technological strategies and innovation capability. Particular attention is focused on subsidiaries in the United States (US) with headquarter units in South Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan. Empirical evidence from a sample of 151 subsidiary plants and establishments suggests that Asian firms invest in the US to upgrade their their knowledge base with a view to supporting new product and market-based innovations. The results of an ordered probit regression model of innovation performance suggests that new product development and marketing capability make a significant contribution to increased US patents among Asian firms while applied research is only marginally significant in explaining firms' innovation capability. The major sources of innovation capability are revolved around a tacit understanding of technology and products than more explicit forms of knowledge. Our empirical findings also suggest that stronger business performance is associated with new product development and marketing capability. #
Involvement of “ostensible customers” in really new innovation: Failure of a start-up
Journal of Engineering and Technology Management, 2017
In contrast to a large body of literature showing the positive impact of customer involvement in really new innovation, this article portrays a failure. Using an inductive research design to examine data collected over four years, the authors analyze the case of a start-up that produced and marketed hi-tech equipment. Although the start-up firm was initially successful, it faced difficulties under the influence of “ostensible customers” who provided insights that were counterproductive in the process of really new innovation. The start-up experienced a downward spiral that ended in product, business, and organizational failure.
Modeling market information processing in new product development: An empirical analysis
Journal of Engineering and Technology Management, 2006
This research explores the antecedents and consequences of market information processing during the development process of new high-tech products. To this end, we develop and test a conceptual model for market information processing in three generic stages of the new product development (NPD) process (predevelopment, development and commercialization). In addition, we explore the relationships between market information processing, its antecedents, and product advantage and success. We test our model with responses from 166 NPD-managers in Dutch high-tech firms. The findings show that the market information processing variables are related differentially to new product outcomes, even when controlling for product advantage and product newness to the market. In addition, we found that companies can enhance market information processing for new high-tech products by influencing project priority and flexibility to new products, and by reducing interdepartmental conflict. #