The Role of Narratives in Sustaining Organizational Innovation

Abstract

S ustaining innovation is a vital yet difficult task. Innovation requires the coordinated efforts of many actors to facilitate (1) the recombination of ideas to generate novelty, (2) real-time problem solving, and (3) linkages between present innovation efforts with past experiences and future aspirations. We propose that innovation narratives are cultural mechanisms that address these coordination requirements by enabling translation. Specifically, innovation narratives are powerful mechanisms for translating ideas across the organization so that they are comprehensible and appear legitimate to others. Narratives also enable people to translate emergent situations that are ambiguous or equivocal so as to promote real-time problem solving. With their accumulation, innovation narratives provide a generative memory for organizations that enable people to translate ideas accumulated from particular instances of past innovation to inform current and future efforts.

The Banality of Organizational Innovations: Embracing the Substance–Process Duality

“…Synthesizing across these observations, we offer narratives of innovation as intra-active boundary objects as one way to benefit from the substance-process duality as applied to innovations and organizations. Narratives of innovation can be simultaneously coherent and plastic, thereby offering the means for actors with different perspectives to intra-act with one another and with material artifacts (Bartel & Garud, 2009;Garud, Simpson, Langley, & Tsoukas, 2015). The presence of multiple narratives of innovation creates a "meshwork" of discourses and activities within and across organizations (Czarniawska, 2013).…”

“…To garner organizational support, intrapreneurs (a term used by Pinchot, 1991, to allude to entrepreneurs within corporations) offer innovation-narratives that resonate with multiple stakeholders. This task is accomplished by crafting innovation-narratives that build upon and yet depart from what is known (Bartel & Garud, 2009). Overall, the accumulation of innovation-narratives covering both successes and failures reduces the likelihood of fragmentation or stasis.…”

Authoring second-generation entrepreneur and family business stories

“…Although first and second-generation stories appear to be essentially different they share similar epistemologies. Stories are boundary objects that resonate with and between multiple audiences (Bartel andGarud, 2009: Wry et al, 2001 Collective identity stories are verbal or written expressions employed by a group of entrepreneurial actors to help project an image of themselves, collectively, as a coherent category with a meaningful label and identity (Wry et al, 2011:450). As with stories at the organizational level, collective identity stories offer ready-made constructions of credibility, appropriateness, and viability and serve as touchstones for audience assessments of legitimacy.…”

Opportunity Creation in Innovation Networks: Interactive Revealing Practices

“…These representational forms allowed for "telescoping" to the future, leveraging heterogeneous knowledge in the networks. 31 Thus, each company could reflect on its competences against jointly revealed future prospects while protecting its technology development. For example, an industrial equipment firm explored the opportunities of carbon fiber by watching other participant companies experiment in the Opportunity Creation in Innovation Networks: Interactive Revealing Practices emerging area without knowing their future intent nor the details of how their results were generated.…”