Knowledge and Process Management
Volume 14 Number 3 pp 190–202 (2007)
Published online in Wiley InterScience
(www.interscience.wiley.com) DOI: 10.1002/kpm.279
Summary
The theme of the article is that organizational culture contributes significantly to the success, or failure, of sustained innovation in organizations. Sustained innovation in turn is a major contributor to sustained, successful financial performance and market success of an organisation.
However, if organizational culture needs to change for innovation to be successful this may present a major problem because organizational culture is not easy to change.
The authors then attempt to analyse an innovative culture by dividing it into eight components (’elements’)
- Innovative mission and vision statements
- Democratic communication
- Safe spaces
- Flexibility
- Collaboration
- Boundary spanning
- Incentives
- Leadership
They then proposed that organizations could be more innovative by adopting suitable combinations of these eight innovative determinants into their culture.
They introduce the concept that innovation requires a systematic, disciplined approach in an organisation to be successful. Innovation may also meet resistance even in the most innovative organizations.
Innovation champions take career-changing risks and need support from their leaders.
Innovative people and teams need to feel safe to experiment and even disagree with leaders without fear of retribution.
Some innovative cultures allow new ideas time, space and permission to grow internally. Some organizations connect globally with ideas, and people, outside the boundaries of the company.
The authors researched the literature on organizational culture and innovation. They then conducted exploratory case studies of over 30 American and European companies.
Review
This article describes a qualitative research approach to discover the essential elements that contribute to the success, or failure, of innovation in organizations.
There are numerous historical references to support their arguments and for additional study. There is a matrix that describes how each of the innovation elements relates to
1. Typical emphasis
2. Example organisation tactics
3. Pitfalls
4. Most encouraged type of innovations
One aspect that would make the article even more interesting would be a stronger conceptual model developed from this matrix. What are the forces generated by the eight elements that contribute to organizational success? Can such forces be quantified at all? Some references to other quantitative research about the effectiveness of the innovative components at various organizations would be useful.
Posted by the "Enlightenment" or some such Innovative name.
- Clement
- Des
- Madalin
- Raju
- Satish
- Teri
