Organizational Innovations

The study of innovation, organisational change and IT takes in broad, complex and wide-ranging perspectives that from a student′s standpoint can be confusing and frequently inaccessible. Organizational Innovations provides a clear understanding of organizational innovation for students and academics teaching in this area. The past decade has greatly transformed our understanding of the origins, evolution and transfer of organizational innovations between sectors and between nations. It selectively draws together the relevant A-Z of key frameworks and concepts from a range of perspectives in organization theory, consumption, management information systems, geography and management of technology. The book offers an accessible introduction to the new approaches and key concepts, and explains how new understanding relates to previous frameworks. The book includes a wide range of examples from a variety of different contexts, including a range of diverse countries. Equal attention is given to the requirements of analysis and practice. It will be essential to students taking courses on innovation. Final year undergraduate courses in management, organization and marketing will find Organizational Innovations of great relevance.

This comprehensive book synthesizes research from the past 50 years of innovation studies, addressing the main elements and providing a connected perspective on innovation within organizations. It explores the generation and adoption of both technological and nontechnological innovations, offering a coherent and systematic view of the process. Fariborz Damanpour examines innovation activity and internal mechanisms and processes in both business and nonbusiness organizations, providing an overview of key concepts, terms, and theory. Insights from behavioral, economic, and structure-based perspectives are used to explain existing findings and help the reader navigate current research on the management of innovation, as well as offering ideas and frameworks to guide new studies. Organizational Innovationwill be an invaluable resource for researchers and graduate-level students of management and organization studies, particularly those working on the management of innovation and technology. It will also prove useful to educators in the field as a reference work for students.

Emerging information technologies of the past few decades are now providing organizations with new tools to develop innovative organizational concepts and applications. This book is a collection of timely research and practical papers on the subject of IT management and its role in organizational innovation.

This comprehensive book synthesizes research from the past 50 years of innovation studies, addressing the main elements of innovation and providing a connected perspective on innovation within organizations. It explores the generation and adoption of both technological and nontechnological innovations, offering a coherent and systematic view of the process. Insights from behavioral, economic and structure-based perspectives are used to explain existing findings and help the reader navigate current research, as well as offering ideas and frameworks to guide new studies.

Organizational innovations have taken second place to technical innovations in explaining sectoral and economic growth. This work redresses this imbalance by showing the long-run importance of organizational innovations, such as the just-in-time practice and lean production systems, in economic growth and development.

Published in 1998. In the past year the 300 largest global companies increased their research budgets by an average of 12 per cent. Governments now measure how technologically advanced they are as they worry about their trade balances and unemployment. Many public sector organizations, for example hospitals, universities and welfare agencies, are struggling to keep up with the rate of technological progress. The selections in this book provide a number of insights on how private firms can be more innovative and public sector organizations can keep up with rapid technological change. They emphasize both radical and incremental innovations and both product and process innovation. In particular the advanced manufacturing technologies so central to Piore and Sabel’s ’Second Industrial Divide’ receive a great deal of attention. Finally, the consequences of innovation are the focus of the last section.

Discusses the organizational processes and structural barriers to the diffusion and adoptions of innovations. This book addresses the organizational learning strategies of adoption and diffusion of process innovation approaches. It also presents the theoretical framework of organizational learning and process innovations.

This book reflects on the increasing variety of perspectives in organizational innovation research, paying attention to the antecedents, but also to the outcomes, of innovation. Some chapters analyze the ‘dark side’ of innovation, including the potential negative consequences of innovative behaviors, or of defying the innovation maximization fallacy. Others explicitly consider affective responses after innovation efforts, and assume that positive or negative effects rely on the context in which innovations occur, and on the way in which people manage the process of innovation. Several contributions adopt the dialectic approach by considering the multiple pathways and mechanisms that could lead to innovation at organizations. Most of the chapters include the interaction of actors’ characteristics (from employees or teams) together with situational constraints from the task or the social context, and outline the relevance of processes like team learning; motivation variables like basic need satisfaction; congruence of motives or meaningfulness at work; dynamics of communication networks; and affective variables. This edited collection offers a rich picture of current research and management trends in the field and contributes constructively toward promoting the dialectic perspective on creativity and innovation in the workplace. This book was originally published as a special issue of the European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology.