Creating and sustaining space for play as leeway for innovation

Abstract

Large established organizations face the 'paradox of institutionalizing spontaneity'. While they recognize the need for innovation and create enabling structures to support it, these very structures can inadvertently constrain the spontaneous qualities essential for breakthrough innovation. This longitudinal ethnographic study explores how organizational members navigate this paradox by following six innovation projects over three years at a multinational technology company. Our processual analysis that combined participant observation, interviews, diaries, and project-related documents reveals that innovation projects progress through tactically re-created 'spaces for play'—temporary leeway that innovators create for themselves within existing organizational structures. We show how these spaces develop through recurring patterns of opening, maintaining, and reconstituting and how project teams employ situated tactics to creatively leverage specific organizational structures to open and sustain them. Projects advance by realigning with company strategy to re-open space for play, while those failing to connect either stop or pivot. Our findings suggest that innovation-enabling structures alone are insufficient. Innovators must continuously use tactical combinations to create and sustain temporary space for play as leeway for innovation, generating emerging impacts that influence organizational contexts and shape subsequent project developments. We also contribute both conceptual refinements and empirical grounding to the mainly theoretical body of knowledge on organizational entrepreneurship and space for play