Deborah J. Dougherty

• Rutgers Business School

Our most pressing societal problems such as enhancing health care, developing alternate energy, revitalizing cities, and advancing the economy are complex innovation systems. Leveraging the enormous potential of sciences and technologies into better resolutions for these complex social and economic challenges requires a transformation in social tec...

Complex innovation processes such as drug discovery present challenges to innovators because they must proceed with limited feedback but face a system that involves enormous amounts of information and unknown interdependencies. Organizational scholars suggest that abductive reasoning fits complex situations and may address many of the challenges of...

This brief essay develops three points to stretch the reflective conversation. One agrees that we need a more expansive understanding of qualitative research because doing qualitative research is doing real science. The second synthesizes insights in the conversation to develop three ways that grounded theory building (GTB) provides unique benefits...

Time pacing, which refers to the regulation of intensity and direction of people's attention and effort, is central to innovation management. However, in a study of complex product innovation in pharmaceuticals, we find that time pacing is a major source of conflict between managers and scientists over innovation management. Our analysis of this te...

This chapter develops a model for managing organizational change that leverages the vast literatures on creativity, innovation, and change. It identifies three tensions in creativity and innovation research, and maps the conflicting perspectives onto different types of organizing. Innovation, the development and use of new ideas within an organizat...

Drug discovery is a complex innovation process in which scientists need to make sense of ambiguous findings and grapple with numerous unpredictable interdependencies over many years of product development. Digitalization has combined with expanding science to address this complexity, creating new ways to measure, analyze, and model chemical compoun...

The purpose of qualitative research is to identify the essential qualities of actual social phenomena, such as organizational learning, technology development, structuring, or strategizing. When we use qualitative research methods, we intend to qualify a phenomenon by figuring out the features that make it what it is. That is, we intend to understa...

For many sectors like health care, financial services, or renewable energy, new products and services are generated by an ecology of business firms, nonprofit foundations, public institutions, and other agents. Knowledge to innovate is dispersed across ecologies, so no single firm or small group of firms can innovate alone. Moreover, many new produ...

New products in sectors such as bio-pharmaceuticals, alternate energy, new materials, and complex products require an enormous amount of new knowledge. Yet this knowledge is widely distributed around the globe, so accessing and absorbing it can be very difficult. We focus on how can industrial scientists recognize, pull in, and apply so much new kn...

For many sectors like health care, financial services, or renewable energy, new products and services are generated by an ecology of business firms, nonprofit foundations, public institutions, and other agents. Knowledge to innovate is dispersed across ecologies, so no single firm or small group of firms can innovate alone. Moreover, many new produ...

Research suggests that scientific knowledge plays a vital role in exploratory innovation, but exactly how scientific processes of knowing unfold for product innovation has not been examined. A growing number of industries create value through complex combinations of science, but managing their innovation effectively requires more insight into how s...

Time pacing, which refers to the regulation of intensity and direction of people's attention and effort, is central to innovation management. However, in a study of complex product innovation in pharmaceuticals, we find that time pacing is a major source of conflict between managers and scientists over innovation management. Our analysis of this te...

Organization studies offers conflicting design ideas to organize large firms in mature industries for sustained product innovation. These conflicts arise in part from the bifurcation in theory between social constraint and social action, even though structuration views emphasize that neither exists without the other. Designs based on social constra...

This paper explores whether, and how, network structures in different types of innovation systems align themselves with the resource pathways that sustain these systems. Floricel and Dougherty (2007) argue that sustainable innovation systems coalesce around pathways that ensure the reproduction of knowledge as well as of other key resources, such a...

Technology has been an important theme in the study of organizational form and function since the 1950s. However, organization science’s interest in this relationship has declined significantly over the past 30 years, a period during which information technologies have become pervasive in organizations and brought about significant changes in them....

This paper leverages current thinking on organising for innovation to create new ideas on contingent organising for innovation. I argue that all successfully innovative organisations need to be built on the same higher-level principles of innovative organising, but the relative emphasis on which principles and how they are implemented will vary by...

This paper contributes to explaining how and why distinct games of innovation emerge by suggesting that games are nested in innovation systems with persistent innovation dynamics. Dominant lifecycle models focus on how innovation systems transit from an effervescent stage, to product innovation, to process innovation, and so on. They propose specif...

Theories of organizational renewal and organizational design often bear little relationship to the complex, murky day-to-day realities people face. This paper develops an understanding of the renewing organization based on the practice of product innovation. The practice of product innovation is conceived of as the creation and exploitation of know...

Supervised by Edgar H. Schein. Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management, 1987. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 180-188).

A central function of organizational boundaries is to help people know what they are to do with whom and how, which enables them to work together. Sustained product innovation in very large organizations requires that perhaps thousands of people across the organization know how to join up, participate in, and move in and out of many new product tea...

Service innovation depends on ambiguous designing and using knowledge. But this knowledge is embedded in ongoing practice, so capturing it requires the practices themselves to be organized somehow. I integrate literatures on work as practice with strategic innovation management to develop empirically grounded theory for this problem.The analysis id...

In this paper we develop an empirically grounded theory for how large, complex organizations manage their technology flows more effectively than others. Effectively managing technology flows is central to the abilities of organizations to innovate and compete, as it enables them to leverage their technological capabilities into streams of new produ...

This article serves as an introductory essay to the special issue of Journal of Technology and Management 18 (3–4). It identifies and articulates the broad themes of the five papers included in that issue. Additionally, it outlines areas where further research is likely to make considerable contributions to the field of socio-technical systems.

This article serves as an introductory essay to this special issue of Journal of Technology and Management. It identifies and articulates the broad themes of the five papers included in this issue. Additionally, it outlines areas where further research is likely to make considerable contributions to the field of socio-technical systems.

Now that technology and innovation management have been brought out of the background in most strategy and organization studies, it is time to sharpen, deepen, and elaborate upon our theories of the field using qualitative research. This essay summarizes my approach to the qualitative elaboration of theory, grounded theory building. While popular "...

The study of the classics in our field is important to the themes of this special issue because (1) the classics have shaped the world we live in: (2) studying the classics enlarges our theoretical alternatives: and (3) the critique of taken-for-granted assumptions enshrined in the classics can spur change, development, and pluralism. We briefly re...

We map out the systems of sensemaking people use to link market and technology knowledge into new products, in innovative versus non-innovative organizations. Systems of sensemaking are organized “webs of meaning” that govern the knowledge people make sense of, and the sense they make. Innovative sensemaking systems link more knowledge because they...

Several years ago, an editorial in a software industry journal asked readers, “Why aren't they using all those marvelous methods?” The focus of the editorial was on software engineering methods, but the question also applies to the broader realm of new product development (NPD). Proven tools exist for gathering, disseminating, and using market info...

We propose that a key dynamic underlying a firm's dynamic capabilities is the interpretive flexibility of its technology system, which refers to the degree to which users of a technology are engaged in its constitution during development and use. We suggest that interpretive flexibility conceptualizes the processes of social coupling between techno...

The ability to generate successful new products is vital for organizations to adapt to changing markets, technologies and competition. But many large, established organizations find, sustained innovation difficult. This study explores the role of power to show how it can both inhibit and facilitate innovation. Analysis by Cynthia Hardy and Deborah...

We examined problems with sustained product innovation in 15 firms that averaged 96 years of age, 54,000 employees, and $9.4 billion in annual revenues. Findings reveal that the inability to connect new products with organizational resources, processes, and strategy thwarted innovation in these large, mature organizations and that innovators lacked...

Any new and promising management idea has a hidden complexity that practitioners ignore at great peril. In this article, Henry Mintzberg and his colleagues draw on their research and experience to point out nine of the of the often-overlooked factors that impact collaborative efforts. These principles include ''Real collaboration may well be psychi...

This article examines the impact of downsizing on product innovation. It compares the experiences of product innovators in companies with a high degree of downsizing with those in companies with less downsizing. Higher downsizing hinders innovation by reducing people's ability to connect their product strategically to the firm. Specifically, downsi...

Internal ventures and a firm's core competencies are mutually constitutive, since each both contributes to and builds on the other. This field study compared successful and failed new product ventures In four large firms, to learn how competencies and ventures relate. The link between ventures and competencies was important to success. It was also...

This paper reports on a theory building effort to understand the persistent difficulties with successful product innovation in large, established firms. Drawing on an institutional approach, we suggest that the constituent activities of effective product innovation either violate established practice or fall into a vacuum where no shared understand...

Successful product innovation requires more than the management of technology; it also must address users’ problems and needs, how the product will be used, and for what purpose. Regarded in this way, a product innovative process is essentially a creative learning process. Based on in-depth analysis of nine cases, we identify and discuss two learni...

The development of commercially viable new products requires that technological and market possibilities are linked effectively in the product's design. Innovators in large firms have persistent problems with such linking, however. This research examines these problems by focusing on the shared interpretive schemes people use to make sense of produ...

This study describes the image of organizing that underlies a complex organization's ability to incorporate streams of inno-vation with continuing operations. I argue that a mechanistic organization archetype prevents people from seeing in their minds' eyes—from imagining—how to do the work of inno-vation organizationwide, but that theorists have f...