Abstract
Previous research has found that organizational innovations are important for organizations’ long-term competitive advantage and for technical innovations. In spite of this conclusion, organizational innovations remain poorly managed and poorly understood, especially the processes through which organizational innovations are created, diffused, and sustained. There is thus a need for a more comprehensive understanding of mechanisms catalyzing organizational development and change. The purpose of this paper is to develop a comprehensive model for studying and better understanding the creation, diffusion, and sustaining of organizational innovations by using a system perspective. The three concepts “creation,” “diffusion,” and “sustaining” are highly intertwined and should not be explored in isolation, as organizational innovations are constantly being re-invented. The model for catalyzing organizational development and change could be visualized as five steps that form a circular pattern around an organizational-specific and path-dependent improvement trajectory rather than a single organizational innovation. The five steps are influenced by the external context, the internal environment, and the characteristics of the innovation itself. Further, different diffusion channels such as consultants, universities, and standardization forums function as mechanisms for knowledge transfer and triggering one or several of the five steps. The model is developed based on two literature reviews conducted over a 14-year period and findings from two empirical studies covering four Swedish manufacturing firms and one hospital. The model proposed here has already been used in practice in a study for the Swedish Innovation Agency VINNOVA. Likewise the model proved to be useful in analyzing both similarities and differences between different national programs for catalyzing organizational development. This comprehensive model, we suggest, has a wider and more general use and is applicable across the Triple Helix model.
Highlights
This paper’s focus is on organizational innovations and on how the creation, diffusion, and sustaining of organizational innovations can be conceptualized from a system perspective
The development of the model follows an abductive approach (Dubois and Gadde 2002), where an initial literature review resulted in a tentative analytical framework, that was subsequently tested in empirical studies providing inputs to refine the framework, which was contrasted to recent literature, resulting in the development of the comprehensive model presented in this paper
A first conclusion is that the model could be visualized as five steps that are in turn influenced by three main sets of influencing factors: the characteristics of the innovation itself, the internal context, and the external context together with different types of diffusion channels transferring knowledge from external sources to the organization
Summary
This paper’s focus is on organizational innovations and on how the creation, diffusion, and sustaining of organizational innovations can be conceptualized from a system perspective. Organizational innovations are here defined as new organizational methods in business practices, workplace organization, or external relations (OECD 2005). Organizational innovations typically aim at increasing operational efficiency and employee satisfaction or at improving an organization’s innovativeness. Organizational innovations are often necessary for technical innovations (Freeman 1982; Leonard-Barton 1988; Tushman and O’Reilly 1997; Teece 2007; Volberda et al 2013). According to Ganter and Hecker (2014), many attempts at adaptation to environmental change are pertaining to organizational innovations. Continuously changing due to rapid technological development, organizations need to make even more effective use of organizational innovations in order to uphold their competitiveness
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