Leadership and Innovation in New Forms of Organizing

Abstract

In response to rapid technological development and an interconnected global economy, innovation is increasingly organized in novel ways (i.e., online communities, interorganizational collaborations, and self-organizing systems). Common to these new forms of organizing is an actor-centered design that allows more self-organizing and local decision-making. With these new forms of organizing, will leadership become less influential on innovation? We argue that leadership as a collective phenomenon distributed or shared among actors remains critical for innovation performance, because it underpins the novel solutions to the four fundamental organizing problems: task division, task allocation, reward provision, and information provision. The first paper in this symposium conceptually explores the characteristics of leadership for leading open and distributive innovation, addressing all four fundamental problems collectively. The second paper examines the role of leadership and governance in online communities ...