What kind of intimacy is meaningful to you? How intimate interactions foster individuals' sensemaking of innovation

This study examines how intimacy affects individuals' sensemaking of innovation in their organization. Although sensemaking facilitates understanding innovation and envisioning new worldviews, it involves a delicate process of self-disclosure, reflection, personal contact and communication. Intimacy focuses on time-bounded interactions that foster individuals' progressive self-disclosure and perceptions of mutual understanding. Therefore, drawing on intimacy theories, we investigate from a microlevel perspective how temporally bounded intimate interactions foster the meaningfulness of innovation for individuals. As sensemaking processes differ in large-scale radical and incremental innovations, we examine both contexts in a post hoc analysis. Through a field study, we show that different intimacy dynamics (emotional, cognitive and listening) influence meaningfulness perceptions. In particular, we find that the emotional intimacy dynamics positively influence meaningfulness perceptions in the context of radical innovation initiatives, while the cognitive and listening intimacy dynamics positively influence meaningfulness perceptions in the context of incremental innovation initiatives. This study contributes to the sensemaking innovation literature by introducing intimacy as an enabler of sensemaking. Our study also suggests that managers should encourage moments of intimate interaction when pursuing innovation to facilitate sensemaking of change

The European Innovation Council: Strategic Reflections

This second section reflects and discusses the establishment of a possible European Innovation Council (EIC) with as central aim the strengthening of European innovation policy while at the same time promoting a more open culture of innovation and entrepreneurship across Europe. The idea is to consider the EIC as an instrument to bring innovation policy in Europe in line with the characteristics of today’s open and collaborative innovation as discussed before, providing at the same time an impulse to innovative renewal at all levels of society. The success of the EIC would manifest itself in the long-term by evidence that its initiatives have created an innovation-friendly environment and new policy instruments, which significantly facilitated the growth of high-potential ‘scale-up’ firms by helping them access large markets, talent, funding and strategic decision makers. The core innovation principle of today “scale-up or fail fast” needs different policy tools than those designed in the past. The creation of complementarities and synergies, adaptations and adjustments motivating and pulling in new stakeholders across a number of existing institutions, policy instruments, constituencies would be central to the EIC. The EIC would focus on a few strategic elements, notably building synergies between different EU level instruments for innovation to maximize their added value on the European level, promoting the focus on people, openness and iterative results, and moving towards a new narrative around innovation and innovators

The liminality of trajectory shifts in institutional entrepreneurship

In this paper, we develop a process model of trajectory shifts in institutional entrepreneurship. We focus on the liminal periods experienced by institutional entrepreneurs when they, unlike the rest of the organization, recognize limits in the present and seek to shift a familiar past into an unfamiliar and uncertain future. Such periods involve a situation where the new possible future, not yet fully formed, exists side-by-side with established innovation trajectories. Trajectory shifts are moments of truth for institutional entrepreneurs, but little is known about the underlying mechanisms of how entrepreneurs reflectively deal with liminality to conceive and bring forth new innovation trajectories. Our in-depth case study research at CarCorp traces three such mechanisms (reflective dissension, imaginative projection, and eliminatory exploration) and builds the basis for understanding the liminality of trajectory shifts. The paper offers theoretical implications for the institutional entrepreneurship literature

The cultural side of value creation

The question of how organizations create value has become a central question for understanding inter-firm competition and performance differentials. Much of the work on the topic emphasizes the importance of technological innovation for improving operational efficiency and/or product functionality . Accordingly, much of the work in the area has focused on understanding the development of technological capabilities and the dynamics of competition among different technologies. Whereas this line of research has contributed greatly to our understanding of value creation through technology performance improvement, it has also left unexplored the strategies for differentiating products on the basis of their cultural significance. Yet, research in a wide variety of disciplines ranging from anthropology, to cultural sociology, and consumer behavior shows that consumers value products not only for their functional and technical performance, but also for their cultural meanings. The infusion of products with cultural meanings enables consumers to use these products to make statements about their personal and social identity and status. It is therefore well understood that consumers derive value not only from what products do (functional value), but also from what they signify in a given social group (symbolic value). While strategy scholars recognize that product meanings are a source of differentiation and generate price premia (Porter, 1980), they also tend to view the activities that generate them – e.g. branding – as a part of the marketing strategy of the firm. More generally, strategy research has been criticized for its reluctance to delve into the demand side of value-creation. Rooted in disciplinary assumptions about atomistic consumers with idiosyncratic preferences, strategy researchers view demand as largely exogenous and ignore its cultural embeddedness in social conventions that define the cultural meanings of objects and shape consumption choices. As a result, they have given limited attention to the question of how firms can strategically manage the symbolic value of their products. In this paper we propose a cultural perspective on value creation that can direct strategic organization research toward the systematic investigation of how producers engage with the cultural meaning systems that supply frameworks for interpretation and valuation of goods. To guide research in this direction we first discuss how products acquire cultural significance and then outline three core implications of these ideas for the strategy and organization of firms. First, we discuss how recognizing the cultural significance of products shifts attention from technological innovation that alters product functionality to cultural innovation that alters their cultural significance. Second, we explain the need to develop distinct cultural resources that enable firms to identify and exploit opportunities for cultural innovation. Third, we draw attention to the need for cultural intent defined as developing an explicit strategy for utilizing cultural resources to achieve specific cultural positioning for the firm’s products

Towards Design Thinking as a Management Practice: A Learning Experiment in Teaching Innovation

There is an increasing need to make management knowledge more consistent with the “messiness” and complexity of actual organizational phenomena and contexts in today’s world, calling for a refoundation of mainstream management theories. The paper focuses on the contribution of design thinking approaches in this sense, particularly addressing the question of how the predisposition for a design thinking approach can be shaped in management education. Following a qualitative inductive research design, it will report the experience of the introduction of new teaching practices inspired by design thinking in a class of students from a Master program on Innovation and Marketing in an Italian University. Based on the empirical findings, the challenges and opportunities of innovating business school teaching towards the construction of a design thinking mentality will be discussed

A Cultural Quest: A Study of Organizational Use of New Cultural Resources in Strategy Formation.

Our study was motivated by the growing influence in cultural sociology and organizational research of the view of culture as a “toolkit”, from which individuals draw resources flexibly to develop strategies of action that address different circumstances. To investigate if and how organizations can also use new and diverse cultural resources, we undertook a historical case study of the incorporation of new cultural resources in an organization’s cultural repertoire. In-depth analysis of four rounds of incorporation of new cultural resources led to the development of a robust theoretical model that identifies cultural repertoire enrichment and organizational identity redefinition as two core mechanisms that facilitate the use of new cultural resources for the development of unconventional strategies and strategic versatility. Our model contributes to organizational research novel theoretical understanding regarding the use of cultural resources in strategy formation and change