Crossing the boundaries: reimagining innovation and diffusion

Abstract

Boundaries represent separation and the end of one thing and the beginning of another. The diffusion of innovations represents a transmission of information, personal relationships, creativity and similarities across boundaries. While policy and management innovation and diffusion studies began as an American state policy field, over the last 20 years the studies have expanded to include new frameworks for Chinese, Korean and other countries’ innovation and diffusion studies. Using an expanded range of institutional structures, leadership, and factors that impact innovation and diffusion, these studies embrace more comparative studies of policy diffusion across countries. In this paper, we lay out key topics in organizational and policy innovation studies, and independent variables found to lead to innovation and diffusion. In addition, we argue we should expand the types of variables included in multivariate models to empirically test questions related to which innovations diffuse rapidly or incompletely, why governments adopt innovations, and what barriers and resources are present across types of innovations. We introduce three types of boundaries—space boundaries, time and path dependency boundaries, and actors boundaries that we believe should be more regularly and broadly included in innovation and diffusion studies, and we conclude by defining how these boundaries can be operationalized.