Conceptualising Levers of Control at the Project Level: a Case Study of New Product Development in an Early Stage Software Incubator

Abstract

The Levers of Control (LOC) framework (Simons, 1995, 2000) is a useful analytical tool to gain insights into the relationships between innovation and control systems. Existing studies using LOC have primarily focused on its use at the corporate and the business unit level. Nevertheless, projects are a prevalent form of organizing innovation activities in contemporary organizations (Turner and Muller, 2003). In this paper, we examine whether the LOC framework holds under the conditions of innovation-oriented projects in small, early-stage companies, and we specify the LOC framework by adding new aspects that enrich the framework as we explore how it operates under the project level. Using qualitative data from an innovation-oriented project in an early-stage software incubator, we provide evidence showing that formal levers of control may have a significant role in small scale, early-stage environment. We further show that the LOC framework is applicable at the project level but we identify new aspects related to the characteristics of innovation-oriented project work (i.e. knowledge integration, urgency and uncertainty) that enrich the original framework so that it better captures how the LOC operates at the project level. Finally, we elaborate on the specificities of each of the levers in the LOC framework as it operates at the project level, highlighting the more substantive variations in comparison with the original formulation at the corporate level.