Innovators’ Acts of Framing and Audiences’ Structural Characteristics in Novelty Recognition

We integrate a rhetorical with an audience-mediated perspective on novelty recognition to advance a conceptual framework where recognition of novel ideas is understood as the result of the interplay between an innovator’s acts of framing and audiences’ structural characteristics. Building on storytelling and narrative research, we argue that innovators can overcome the liability of newness of their ideas by framing them so as to shape the evaluation of relevant audiences (e.g., peers, critics, investors or users). We also suggest that non-agentic mechanisms can render a field more or less permeable to the reception of novel ideas. Specifically, we propose that two audience-level characteristics affect novelty evaluation: audience heterogeneity and whether an audience is internal or external to cultural producers’ (including innovators’) professional community. Studying innovators’ acts of framing and marrying them with audience-level characteristics affords a window into a more nuanced understanding of how novel ideas are recognized and eventually accepted in cultural fields, thus offering several contributions to research on innovation and entrepreneurship and, more generally, social evaluation

Innovation and organization:Value and competition in selection systems

New definitions are proposed for the concepts 'innovation' and 'organization' by looking at the concepts in terms of value and competition and using the framework of the selection system. Also, new definitions are proposed for 'importance of an innovation' and 'stylistic innovation'. Some results can be directly derived from the definitions, such as that economic entities can exist that are organizations in the perception of the individual members and groups of competing actors in the perception of others. Together the new definitions provide a foundation for a better understanding of not just the concepts themselves but also of the relationships between the type and importance of innovations and the most likely characteristics of successful innovators