Innovation Champions’ Activities and Influences in Organisations — A Literature Review

Abstract

Innovation champions often play a pivotal role in facilitating new ideas and technology-based innovations within organisations. The rise of digital technology has led to radical changes in the nature of innovation and calls for an assessment of existing knowledge on innovation champions’ activities and their influence on organisations and networks. This paper provides a systematic, interdisciplinary literature review on innovation champions from an individual and organisational perspective. Based on a search of 149 high-quality journals and conference proceedings, we identified 92 articles as relevant and synthesised prior knowledge on innovation champions. We find that, whereas innovation champions’ activities have been explored in detail, research on innovation champions’ influence, especially on networks, has been limited. Furthermore, we identify research gaps with respect to differences in innovation champions’ activities at distinct stages of the innovation lifecycle and the formation of innovation champions’ networks.

Heroes of Diffusion: Making User Innovations Widely Available

“…Champions actively pursue new product ideas, evolve them into innovations, and bring them to market (Schon, 1963). Champions are associated with pursuing opportunity to create value for the organization (e.g., Howell and Higgins, 1990), and take charge of the full innovation process (Hölzle et al, 2010;Drechsler et al, 2021). In contrast, disseminators in our case study created value for a particular user group, only addressed the gap between initial prototyping and broad diffusion, and delegated commercialization to others.…”

Playing the political game of innovation: An integrative framework and future research directions

“…Scholars have started to investigate how strategic actors use politics to get support for their initiatives, exploring areas of framing and issue-selling that promote innovation (Lu et al, 2019;Röth et al, 2019). This literature conceives political behavior as how actors achieve their goals in power struggles with others with heterogeneous and conflicting interests (Drechsler et al, 2021;Markham, 1998), and it typically focuses on the actions and motivations of innovation promotors, or champions (e.g., Kelley & Lee, 2010). This research offers insight into the functional consequences of political behavior for product innovation, for example by speeding up the internal process (e.g., Dayan et al, 2012) and making it more flexible (e.g., Röth et al, 2023).…”

From ideas to innovations: The role of individuals in idea implementation

“…For instance, in their influential meta-analysis on individual-level innovation predictors, Hammond et al (2011) Existing literature reviews on the topic tend to examine a specific part of the implementation stage, such as idea championing (Drechsler et al, 2021); focus on specific types of implementers, such as innovation leaders (Kremer et al, 2019); or adopt broader multilevel approaches that include individual, group, organizational and other levels (Anderson et al, 2014;Kim & Chung, 2017;Zennouche et al, 2014). Although these reviews have offered important insights into their particular focus areas, their views of the individual remain restricted to a few notable individual factors, such as influencing skills (Drechsler et al, 2021) or knowledge-sharing behaviour (Kremer et al, 2019). Apart from these reviews, extant research has identified several individual-level factors contributing to idea implementation, including social skills (Baer, 2012), knowledge and experience (Birdi et al, 2016), cognitive abilities (Cerinšek & Dolinsek, 2009), motivation (Zennouche et al, 2014) and personality traits (Griffin et al, 2009).…”

“…Existing literature reviews on the topic tend to examine a specific part of the implementation stage, such as idea championing (Drechsler et al, 2021); focus on specific types of implementers, such as innovation leaders (Kremer et al, 2019); or adopt broader multilevel approaches that include individual, group, organizational and other levels (Anderson et al, 2014; Kim & Chung, 2017; Zennouche et al, 2014). Although these reviews have offered important insights into their particular focus areas, their views of the individual remain restricted to a few notable individual factors, such as influencing skills (Drechsler et al, 2021) or knowledge‐sharing behaviour (Kremer et al, 2019).…”