Though much work has studied organizational identity and the management of innovation, very little work explores the connection between them. Yet we argue that these separate conversations yield implications for one another and offer a rich area for future research. By its nature, innovation is about novelty and change, while identity is rooted in stability and endurance. This contrast creates a fundamental tension, which we explore. We propose that innovative activities like technological change fall on a spectrum from identity-enhancing to identity-stretching to identity-challenging. Both identity-enhancing and identity-stretching innovations result in a mutually constitutive dynamic in which identity and innovation reinforce each other. Identity-challenging innovations, however, create organizational discord and dysfunctional dynamics unless realigned with identity. We discuss the implications of these varying states and call for future research that builds upon and extends our understanding of the relationship between identity and innovation across multiple levels of analysis.
Please scroll down for article-it is on subsequent pagesWith 12,500 members from nearly 90 countries, INFORMS is the largest international association of operations research (O.R.) and analytics professionals and students. INFORMS provides unique networking and learning opportunities for individual professionals, and organizations of all types and sizes, to better understand and use O.R. and analytics tools and methods to transform strategic visions and achieve better outcomes. For more information on INFORMS, its publications, membership, or meetings visit http://www.informs.org I t is well established that firms make a series of positioning choices that shape how they compete within an industry. However, much of this work has examined competition within established industries where performance attributes are well understood. By contrast, we know little about how firms position their products within nascent industries, which often are characterized by extreme uncertainty about what the product even is. We address this gap through an inductive study of the emergence of the music synthesizer, drawing upon a unique data set of four leading firms' complete product offerings and advertisements from 1975 through 1986 as well as interviews with professional musicians over the same time period. We discover that conventional dimensions of competitive positioning, such as features and price, do not capture important distinctions in how firms framed their products. Rather, firms projected two distinct meanings for the synthesizer: a new instrument that enables a musician to create and/or play new "synth" sounds, or an emulator of acoustic instruments. These meanings were also salient amongst professional musicians. The fundamental differences in meaning were distinct from both the product label as well as the technical "reality" of each synthesizer, and shaped the ways in which firms positioned and thus differentiated their products. Specifically, our analysis reveals three meaning-based strategies for positioning new products: meaning-focusing, meaning-spanning, and meaningmixing. We also consider the implications of our findings for the literatures on emergent categories and on the social construction of technology.
Analytical technologies that structure and process data hold great promise for organizations but also may pose fundamental challenges for how knowledge workers accomplish tasks. Knowledge workers are generally considered experts who develop deep understanding of their tools, but recent observations suggest that in some situations, they may black box their analytical technologies, meaning they trust their tools without understanding how they work. I conducted a two-year inductive ethnographic study of the use of analytical technologies across four groups in an investment bank and found two distinct paths that these groups used to validate financial analyses through what I call “validating practices”: actions that confirm whether a produced analysis is trustworthy. Surprisingly, engaging in these practices does not necessarily equate to understanding the calculations performed by the technologies. In one path, validating practices are partitioned across junior and senior roles: junior bankers engage in assembling tasks and use the analytical tools to perform analysis, while only senior bankers interpret the analysis. In the other path, junior and senior members engage in co-construction: junior bankers do both assembling and interpreting tasks, and senior bankers engage in interpreting and provide feedback on junior bankers’ reasoning and choices. Both junior and senior bankers in the partitioning groups routinely black boxed the algorithms embedded in their technologies, taking them for granted without understanding them. By contrast, bankers in the co-construction groups were conscious of the algorithms and understood their potential impact. I found that black boxing influenced the knowledge outputs of these bankers and constrained the development of junior members’ expertise, with consequences for their career trajectories.
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