A Quad Model for Assessing Innovation Potential: Toward a Theory of Innovation Orchestration Quality

Abstract

The study draws on the prevalent theories for orchestrating cross-organizational innovation and new knowledge development processes, and proposes a new, epistemic perspective for contextualizing innovation with two management dimensions, namely, innovation complexity and innovation orchestration preconditions. Innovation complexity concerns the indeterminacy or contingency of new knowledge, or new competence, to be pursued during the course of organizational innovation. Innovation orchestration preconditions refer to the contextual innovation prerequisites that should be well meshed with one another to provide a sufficiency for innovation success. The preconditions include innovation units’ structures and connectivity, behavior, and convenorship. The two dimensions describe a context map-an antithetic quad model-to imply four innovation orchestration qualities, namely, coherence, cohesiveness, congruence, and concordance. Based on the quad model, the study sets forth a measurement of the four qualities, which can assess innovation potential. To corroborate the quad model and the corresponding quality measurements, the study discursively observes a cross-sectoral innovation project. The observation results evidence the multi-finality of the four qualities for innovation success. The results reveal that it is necessary for these four qualities to be managed temporally and dynamically at different stages of innovation, and reject a fallacy that any one of these qualities is more necessary than the others. The study posits that if innovation units can be convened in accordance with the four qualities, the likelihood of innovation success will be sufficiently increased. The study finally discusses theoretical and practical implications of orchestration and convenorship.