We define management innovation as the invention and implementation of a man-agement practice, process, structure, or technique that is new to the state of the art and is intended to further organizational goals. Adopting an intraorganizational evolutionary perspective, we examine the roles of key change agents inside and outside the organization in driving and shaping four processes—motivation, inven-tion, implementation, and theorization and labeling—that collectively define a model of how management innovation comes about. Over the past half-century, scholars around the world have produced a vast body of aca-demic research and writing on innovation. While most of this research has focused on var-ious aspects of technological innovation (e.g., Henderson & Clark, 1990; Utterback, 1994), the trend over the last fifteen years has been toward exploring other forms of innovation, such as pro-cess innovation (e.g., Pisano, 1996), service inno-vation (e.g., Gallouj & Weinstein, 1997), and stra-tegic innovation (Hamel, 1998; Markides, 1997), with a view to understanding how they are man-aged and how they contribute to long-term firm success. The focus in this article is on a relatively under-researched form of innovation—management innovation—and particularly the processes through which it occurs. We apply a relatively narrow definition of management innovation— specifically, the invention and implementation of a management practice, process, structure, or technique that is new to the state of the art and is intended to further organizational goals. While many of the landmarks of management innovation are familiar to every business scholar (e.g., GE's development of the modern research lab and GM's invention of the M-form organization structure), the amount of detailed knowledge about how management innovation is actually implemented is limited. In its broadest sense, management innova-tion has, of course, received considerable re-search attention over the years. As we discuss in the following section, there are four key perspectives in the literature: (1) an institu-tional perspective that focuses on the socio-economic conditions in which new manage-ment ideas and practices take shape (e.g., Guillé n, 1994); (2) a fashion perspective that focuses on the dynamic interplay between us-ers and providers of management ideas (e.g., Abrahamson, 1996); (3) a cultural perspective that focuses on how an organization reacts to the introduction of a new management prac-tice (e.g., Zbaracki, 1998); and (4) a rational perspective that focuses on how management innovations—and the individuals who drive them— deliver improvements in organization-al effectiveness (e.g., Chandler, 1962). There is also a related body of literature concerned with the subsequent diffusion of management innovations across industries or countries (e.g., Guler, Guillé n, & MacPherson, 2002). But useful as these bodies of literature are, they have surprisingly little to say about the gen-erative mechanisms by which new manage-ment ideas are first created and put into prac-tice. To state the point slightly differently, our understanding of the processes of manage-ment innovation is currently very limited and