Converting Inventions into Innovations in Large Firms: How Inventors at Xerox Navigated the Innovation Process to Commercialize Their Ideas

Abstract

The challenges of commercializing breakthrough inventions in large firms have been studied extensively through a lens of managerial decision-making and resource allocation. This perspective has characterized the innovation process in large firms as one in which inventors confine themselves to idea generation, leaving idea commercialization to other actors, subject to organizational inertia. We develop a complementary perspective of the innovation process in which inventors may navigate organizational inertia by going beyond idea generation to attracting resources towards commercializing their breakthrough inventions. Using historical case studies of three breakthrough inventions at Xerox office workstations, personal computers, and laser printers we illustrate this resource-attraction process and how it affected the conversion of these inventions into innovations. Inventors navigated multiple evaluation criteria used by Xerox managers to allocate resources towards inventions. These criteria stemmed from Xerox’s first successful breakthrough invention, the 914 copier and the specific objectives of the different organizational units. We highlight two approaches deployed by Xerox inventors—searching across the different organizational units for more favorable evaluation criteria and shaping the evaluation criteria to help attract resources. While searching leveraged the heterogeneity of evaluation criteria across the different organizational units, shaping required the presence of evaluative uncertainty with respect to the appropriate criteria for evaluating a breakthrough invention. By offering a novel account of how inventors at Xerox navigated multiple evaluation criteria to commercialize their inventions, the study sheds light on an important yet overlooked aspect of the innovation process in large firms that can facilitate the commercialization of breakthrough inventions.