Innovation Blindness: Culture, Frames, and Cross-Boundary Problem Construction in the Development of New Technology Concepts

Abstract

This paper has three goals. The first is to understand why members of one organizational department are blind to the reasons why members of another department do not share their ideas for a new technology—what I call a “technology concept.” The second is to understand what consequences this “innovation blindness” has for the development of technology concepts across organizational and occupational boundaries. The third is to uncover strategies organizations might use to successfully develop a new technological artifact from the technology concept even if innovators never understand the nature of their own blindness. To achieve these goals, I draw on research on organizational cultural toolkits to construct a framework suggesting that technology concepts frame cultural resources, which are then used to construct the very problems the technological artifact will be built to solve. From this perspective, culture does not directly shape technological artifacts. Rather, a technology concept activates culture as it draws frames around resources that will guide people's problem construction practices. By acting as a frame through which problems can be constructed, technology concepts play a key role in selecting the set of cultural resources that will be used to develop technological artifacts. I explore this framework through a qualitative study of computer simulation software in a major automotive engineering firm.