Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-ndw9j Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-10T15:39:11.793Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Managers Fail to Innovate and Academics Fail to Explain How

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 March 2018

Deborah Dougherty
Deborah Dougherty*
Affiliation:
Rutgers University, USA
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

I am stunned by the failure of so many organizations to create the capability for generating streams of new products and services over time. Organizations capable of ongoing innovation can create more profits, more value, more employment, more growth, and more adaptability to transformations in technologies and markets (BCG study of investor returns). Generating streams of innovation is even more important now, especially for organizations in emerging economies, because industrial transformations and global grand challenges (Ferraro, Etzion, & Gehman, 2015) demand continuous innovations in products, programs, business processes, and strategies. For example, digitalization is transforming business models from vertical industrial silos such as consumer goods, materials, or financials to horizontal platforms that orchestrate networks, create technologies, and provide services (think Amazon, Alibaba). New markets and technologies emerge unpredictably but will produce major economic and social changes. Emerging economies more directly face grand challenge complexities of poverty, water scarcity, inequality, and climate changes. Innovations in emerging economy organizations are also very complex, since they often include innovations in sales, distribution, and business models along with rigorous product design and development processes.

Type
Dialogue, Debate, and Discussion
Information
Management and Organization Review , Volume 14 , Issue 1 , March 2018 , pp. 229 - 239
Copyright
Copyright © The International Association for Chinese Management Research 2018 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

Ackoff, R. 1981. On the use of models in corporate planning. Strategic Management Journal, 2 (4): 353–359.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ansell, C. 2011. Pragmatist democracy: Evolutionary learning as public philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Barley, S. R. 1996. Technicians in the workplace: Ethnographic evidence for bringing work into organization studies. Administrative Science Quarterly, 41 (3): 404–441.Google Scholar
Brown, S. L., & Eisenhardt, K. M. 1997. The art of continuous change: Linking complexity theory and time-paced evolution in relentlessly shifting organizations. Administrative Science Quarterly, 42 (1): 1–34.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Clark, K., & Fujimoto, T. 1991. Product development performance. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press.Google Scholar
Cyert, R., & March, J. 1963. A behavioral theory of the firm. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.Google Scholar
Denrell, J., Fang, C., & Levinthal, D. 2004. From t-mazes to labyrinths: Learning from model-based feedback. Management Science, 50 (10): 1366–1378.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dougherty, D. 2016. Taking advantage of emergence: Productively innovating in complex innovation systems. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dougherty, D., & Hardy, C. 1996. Sustained product innovation in large, mature organizations: Overcoming innovation-to-organization problems. Academy of Management Journal, 39 (5): 1120–1153. Reprinted in J. Storey (Ed.), The management of innovation, Vol. II: 22–55. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar Publishing Limited.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dunne, D., & Dougherty, D. 2016. Abductive reasoning: How innovators navigate in the labyrinth of complex product innovation. Organization Studies, 37 (2): 131–159.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dougherty, D., Bertels, H., Chung, K., & Kraemer, J. 2013. Whose time is it? Clock-time pacing and event-time pacing in complex innovations. Management and Organization Review, 9 (2): 223–264.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Feldman, M., & Pentland, B. 2003. Reconceptualizing organizational routines as a source of flexibility and change. Administrative Science Quarterly, 48 (1): 94–118.Google Scholar
Ferraro, F., Etzion, D., & Gehman, J. 2015. Tackling grand challenges pragmatically: Robust action revisited. Organization Studies, 36 (3): 363–390.Google Scholar
Grandori, A. 2010. A rational heuristic model of economic decision making. Rationality and Society, 22 (4): 477–504.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jelinek, M., & Schoonhoven, C. 1990. The innovation marathon: Lessons from high technology firms. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.Google Scholar
Leonard-Barton, D. 1995. Wellsprings of knowledge: Building and sustaining the sources of innovation. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press.Google Scholar
Locke, K., Golden-Biddle, K., & Feldman, M. 2008. Making doubt generative: Rethinking the role of doubt in the research process. Organization Science, 19 (6): 907–918.Google Scholar
Magnani, L. 2001. Abduction, reason, and science: Processes of discovery and explanation. New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers.Google Scholar
Markham, S., & Lee, H. 2013. Product Development and Management Association 2012 comparative performance assessment study. Journal of Product Innovation Management, 30 (3): 408–429.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nesher, D. 2001. Peircian epistemology of learning and the function of abduction as the logic of discovery. Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, 1 (37): 23–57.Google Scholar
Nightingale, P. 2004. Technological capabilities, invisible infrastructure and the un-social construction of predictability: The overlooked fixed costs of useful research. Research Policy, 33 (9): 1259–1284.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schon, D. A. 1983. The reflective practitioner: How professionals think in action. New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar
Tsoukas, H. 2005. Complex knowledge: Studies in organizational epistemology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Tushman, M., & O'Reilly, C. 1997. Winning through product innovation. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press.Google Scholar
Van de Ven, A. 1986. Central problems in the management of innovation. Management Science, 32 (5): 590–607.Google Scholar
Van de, Ven, A., Polley, D., Garud, R., & Venkataraman, S. 1999. The innovation journey. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Weick, K. E. 2005. Organizing and failures of imagination. International Public Management Journal, 8 (3): 425–438.Google Scholar