Storytelling of business innovation leaders

This paper explores innovation narratives as mobilized by business innovation leaders. Twenty seven semi-structured interviews have been conducted with senior managers from UK construction and infrastructure firms. Retrospective narratives of innovation focus on past experiences and activities, activating an organizational memory and informing future generations of employees. The real-time narratives of innovation are focused on the ways interviewees tend to shape industrial development and changes, enabling organizational members to generate action nets around people and data. Prospective narratives of innovation generate creative imaginings, linking an understanding of industrial trends with a knowledge of relevant organizational resources and business strategies. The paper advances an understanding of the connection between retrospective, real-time and prospective narratives that generates organizational learning

The dynamics of story construction: What kinds of stories are generated to serve different purposes?

This article focuses on the dynamics of storytelling in organisations. The following three interrelated questions guided the enquiry: What is the role of stories in organisational settings? What kinds of stories are available and why some are activated and others are not? How stories function as collective representations? The study is based on in-depth semi-structured interviews conducted with twenty chief executive officers (CEOs) of UK-based infrastructure, construction and engineering organisations and participation in a number of industry events and workshops. The article’s theoretical contribution is twofold: first, it demonstrates that there is the dynamics of story construction in organisational settings between verbal and non-verbal stories, personalised anecdotal as well as performative, business-oriented stories; second, it is the performative, business-oriented stories that function as collective representations, whilst personalised anecdotal are unique and function as entertainment and engagement with people

Radicality of Innovation: Perceptions of Organizational Members

Evaluations of "radicality" of innovations are mostly related to final products and services, however, examination of innovative ideas earlier on has an important implications for future innovations. Organisational members make decisions on whether or not to propose innovative ideas to the agenda. These decisions are often based on their personal judgements and perceptions. In this paper, a categorisation of innovative ideas by low, medium and high degree of radicality is proposed. The objective is to, on one hand, demonstrate the correctness of the categorisation proposed and, on the other hand, retrieve insights on how the level of radicality of products is conceived by practitioners. The results of a quasi-experimental investigation report that radicality of innovation relates to a degree of change in products. Based on perceptions of practitioners, with an increase in degree of radicality of innovative ideas, the value for rewards enhances

Senior managers’ reflections on learning in project-based organisations: A sensemaking perspective

The literature has increasingly recognized the relevance of sensemaking in relation to learning. However, limited research has specifically explored learning in project-based organizations from a sensemaking perspective. This article adopts a sensemaking perspective to understand learning in the context of project-based organizations based on reflections of project leaders. Twenty seven semi-structured interviews have been conducted with senior managers from large construction, engineering and infrastructure firms. It is argued that sensemaking provides an insightful perspective through which to understand learning