Local Search Vs Exploration In Innovation Processes

Seminar paper from the year 2008 in the subject Business economics - Business Management, Corporate Governance, grade: 2,3, Free University of Berlin (Fachbereich Wirtschaftswissenschaften ), course: Seminar Innovative Organization, language: English, abstract: Internationalization, shorter product life cycles and increasing complexity have lead to a situation in today’s world where organizations around the globe, on every level of the innovation process and in every industry, face increasing competition. Especially affected by these characteristics are high-tech industries, which are often characterized through a high rate of product novelties, cutting edge technology and rapidly changing industry standards. Examples for hightechnology industries that have been used in academic journal articles and that have been subject to empirical research are the robotic industry, the semiconductor industry and the optical disc industry. Especially in those industries organizations rely on constant and ongoing innovation to create and sustain competitive advantages and, therefore, to stay in business. Those innovative companies that constantly innovate and that are characterized through a high level of entrepreneurship can also be illustrated as “knowledge-creating companies” or “learning organization”. But what makes them so innovative? How do they choose an innovation style? How is innovation managed? My point in this paper will be that innovation management should be able to answerer the following three questions: “How?” Which innovation style is used “When?” On which level of the innovation process is a style used “Why?” Reason for the innovation style used on that level These questions seem to be most important since Fagerberg states in the introduction of the Oxford Handbook of Innovation: “In spite of the large amount of research in this area during the past fifty years, we know much less about why and how innovation occurs than what it leads to.” Additionally, the question of “when?” is added to conceptualize the innovation process into dependent innovation process levels that follow each other in a distinct order. To answerer these questions I will start with a general description of what innovation is, what exploration and exploitation are, I will describe the general setting in which organizations have to operate and what defines an innovative organization.

Featuring contributions from prominent thinkers and researchers, this volume in the "Advances in Management Information Systems" series provides a rich set of conceptual, empirical, and introspective studies that epitomize fundamental knowledge in the area of Business Process Transformation. Processes are interpreted broadly to include operational and managerial processes within and between organizations, as well as those involved in knowledge generation. Transformation includes radical and incremental change, its conduct, management, and outcome. The editors and contributing authors pay close attention to the role of IS organizations and information technologies in facilitating business process transformation. Each chapter places major emphasis on clearly articulating the "knowledge" generated, both theoretical and applied. The book incorporates case studies and tables throughout, and provides fundamental grounding for any stakeholder of business process transformation.

​Relying on the extensive study of a multi-national Company, this work proposes a process view of the way firms balance tensions between exploring new knowledge and exploiting old one. First, ideas are generated throughout the organization. These ideas are funneled towards specific project teams that further develop and refine them. Second, projects are assessed by the top management. Agreed projects are then progressively transformed into exploitable products, following a transformative learning process. We then make propositions regarding the role information systems can play in sustaining this process. Regarding the first phase of the cycle, we will focus on systems that help in sustaining idea generation and in balancing explorative and exploitive projects in the technologies portfolio of the firm. Regarding the second phase, we will look at information systems that could be useful in supporting knowledge transfer and knowledge interpretation across a multi-national company.​​

Identifying the origins and evolution of innovation and project management, this unique Handbook explains why and how the two fields have grown and developed as separate disciplines, highlighting how and why they are now converging. It explores the theoretical and practical connections between the management of innovations and projects, examining the close relationship between the disciplines.

This book examines current and emerging challenges in manufacturing related to the ideal of developing production processes with variability and agility on one level of the system, combined with structures ensuring stability and robustness on another level; close to what by other scholars has been discussed in terms of continuous innovation. However, this ideal has proven to be difficult to achieve in practice, and there is a need for enhanced and more sophisticated theoretical models dealing with the complexity surrounding organizational conditions to foster incremental as well as radical change in production systems, and, at the same time to ensure stability over time. As a theoretical frame of reference, a perspective on change where conflicting demands and conflicting activities, e.g., exploration and exploitation, are seen as intertwined and interdependent, is used throughout the book. The ideal from this perspective is to make use of such conflicting forces and to develop the change dynamics by keeping them in the same social system, not to structurally separate them in different departments or different initiatives. The main purpose of the book is to address an increased need for quality improvement through innovation and disruptive change in production. Traditional theories and managerial models of production systems are developed with a focus on stability and improvement. There is a need for enhanced models to reach an ability to develop new future production systems. The goal of the book is to provide nuances and new perspectives giving more realistic models of the production system to be able to increase the change potentiality of the organization and thus the long-term competiveness. Learning and organizational perspectives are in focus as enablers to increase the understanding of a production system as such. Long-term competitiveness through adaptability and the potential for radical improvement is of importance throughout the book. The use of dualities and the concept of ambidextrous organizations as a frame of understanding is the innovative strength for this area.

This book is based on the findings, issues and questions related to an ongoing decade-old research project named the Innovation Lab (www.innovation-lab.org). The research project focuses on discontinuous innovation in more than thirteen countries, most of which are European, and provides useful insights into its different challenges. It also raises several questions related to the subject, some of which are: how do firms pick up weak signals on emerging — and possibly radically different — innovation? What should firms do when these weak signals hit their “mainstream” process? What are the criteria for allocating resources to a strategic innovation project? What actions should firms take to avoid being left out by the “corporate immune system”? How should firms organize projects that often break existing rules and require new rules to be created? This book attempts to provide answers to the above mentioned questions by gathering information from the research project and also from firms that have tried exploring various ideas, models and insights to tackle discontinuous innovation. Written in a simple and accessible manner, this book will be of interest to both practitioners and academics alike.

This edited volume seeks to explore established as well as emergent forms of governance by combining social network analysis and governance research. In doing so, contributions take into account the increasingly complex forms which governance faces, consisting of different types of actors (e.g. individuals, states, economic entities, NGOs, IGOs), instruments (e.g. law, suggestions, flexible norms) and arenas from the local up to the global level, and which more and more questions theoretical models that have focused primarily on markets and hierarchies. The topics addressed in this volume are processes of coordination, arriving at and implementing decisions taking place in network(ed) (social) structures; such as governance of work relations, of financial markets, of innovation and politics. These processes are investigated and discussed from sociologists’, political scientists’ and economists’ viewpoints. ​

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 10th IFIP WG 5.5/SOCOLNET Advanced Doctoral Conference on Computing, Electrical and Industrial Systems, DoCEIS 2019, held in Costa de Caparica, Portugal, in May 2019. The 36 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 73 submissions. The papers present selected results produced in engineering doctoral programs and focus on technological innovation for industry and serivce systems. Research results and ongoing work are presented, illustrated and discussed in the following areas: collaborative systems, collaboration and resilient systems, decision and optimization systems, assistive systems, smart environments, smart manufacturing, water monitoring systems, communication systems, and energy systems.