Small- to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are recognized as drivers of economic growth, yet commonly face low innovation and organizational success due to insufficient cross-functional integration. We pose the simple question: what factors hinder cross-functional integration from occurring? We analyse cross-functional integration at management level by developing the framework of dominant ideological modes of rationality, composing professional identity, power relations and rationalities and through the construct of ‘members’ categorization devices’ (MCDs). The article builds theory from a longitudinal in-depth empirical investigation of ‘everyday’ micro-political processes involved in cross-functional integration by drawing on political and ethnomethodological perspectives. It provides novel findings on the dynamics between power relations and cross-functional integration, the influence of ‘thought worlds’ of different functions involved in the innovation process, and contributes empirical evidence that professional identity produces power relations and rationality. Implications for theory, method and practice are considered.
We begin by asking: what is innovation, and note the problems of defining both context and novelty in the usual essentialist answers. Within the literature, nonetheless, a range of types of innovation is identified, which we delineate. One way of trying to address the critique of innovation as essentialist is to try and demarcate degrees and dimensions of innovativeness. Given the specificity of this Handbook with service innovation, we next consider this particular type of innovation, looking especially at the literature associated with the view that profit is increasingly to be found in what is termed Service-Dominant (S-D) logic. We conclude the chapter by reiterating some problems in innovation research that any further extension of the term to "service innovation" will have to contend with.
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