Organizing for Radical Innovation: Exploring Novel Insights

Abstract

While radical innovation brings extensive economic rewards to firms, it is an activity fraught with risk. Prior research has shown that such risks mainly stem from organizational arrangements (at the level of individuals, teams, firms, and inter firm collaborations), which are inadequate or inefficient to support radical innovation. The papers in this special issue on “Organizing for Radical Innovation: Exploring Novel Insights” take stock of past work and provide novel insights about how to organize for radical innovation. The overarching idea linking them is that radical innovation hinges on the creation of fundamentally new knowledge and the continuous stimulation of creativity. Thus, organizational arrangements that support such processes play a crucial role in explaining and predicting the successful commercialization of breakthrough ideas, radically new technologies, and solutions. In particular, the field of science, which in essence aims for the systematic production of new knowledge, can be a valid source of inspiration for how individuals, teams, firms, and interfirm collaborations should organize for radical innovation. Moving from these premises, in this introductory paper, we offer an overview of the topic of organizing for radical innovation and highlight possible linkages with the organizing principles. Then, we summarize the main insights from the papers in this special issue and use their core ideas to sketch a novel research agenda for scholars working at the intersection of organization theory, economics of science, and management of innovation.

Building a bridge between performance management, radical innovation, and innovation networks: A systematic literature review

“…Firms must invest in RI to increase their chances of survival and to maintain their competitive advantage over the long term (O'Connor & Martino, 2006). While incremental innovation follows more linear and predictable processes (Bagno, Salerno, & Silva, 2017) that result "from fitting, recombining, reusing, and adapting existing knowledge" (Colombo, von Krogh, Rossi-Lamastra, & Stephan, 2017), RI is associated with high levels of uncertainty. Moreover, a single firm rarely exhibits all of the requisite capabilities and competencies to develop and commercialize an RI initiative (Adner & Kapoor, 2010;Chesbrough, 2003).…”

Knowledge Development Approaches and Breakthrough Innovations in Technology‐Based New Firms

“…The topic of this special issue is breakthrough innovations, defined as high‐impact innovations (Conti, Gambardella, and Mariani, ; Kaplan and Vakili, ; Phene et al, ) or products “that create entirely new markets or radically change existing ones” (Colombo et al, ). It is typically argued that producing breakthrough innovation involves re‐combination of distant and diverse knowledge bases (e.g., Cassiman et al, ; Kaplan and Vakili, ) and the ability to explore complex issues with a deep‐dive into a specific arena (e.g., Padgett and Powell, ; Weisberg, ).…”

“…As noted by Colombo, Rossi‐Lamastra, Stephan, and van Krogh (), large, established incumbent firms confront severe obstacles when engaging in the development of breakthrough innovations (Christensen, ; Henderson, ). This means smaller and newer firms are expected to fill the gap.…”

The Topic Landscape of Disruption Research—A Call for Consolidation, Reconciliation, and Generalization

“…Especially noteworthy, interlinked topics that were—and likely still are conceptually and logically—connected have drifted apart. A very momentous finding, given the fact that, for example, “organizational arrangements […] play a crucial role in explaining and predicting the successful commercialization of breakthrough ideas” (Colombo et al, , p. 394).…”