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"The Innovation Journey: You can't control it,
But you can learn to maneuver it."
Prof. Andrew H. Van de Ven
Carlson School of Management, Univ. of Minnesota
Essay for Innovation: Organization and Management Journal
Draft August 30, 2016
While innovations, by definition, are unique new ideas that are implemented, the process of
developing innovations from concept to implementation follows a remarkably similar pattern. It reflects a
nonlinear cycle of divergent and convergent activities that may repeat in unpredictable ways over time.
This process, illustrated in Figure 1, was found in the development of a wide variety of new technologies,
products, programs, and services in business, government, and non-profit organizations by our Minnesota
Innovation Research Program (Van de Ven, Polley, Garud & Venkataraman, 199; 2008) and other studies
reviewed in Garud, Tuertscher & Van de Ven, 2013). T It challenges the commonplace view that
managers can control the innovation process, and that they are responsible for innovation success.
Instead, the findings suggest that innovation managers should be held accountable for increasing their
odds of success by developing and practicing skills in learning, leading, relating, and cycling through the
innovation journey.
-- Insert Figure 1 about here. --
In summary, this innovation journey tends to unfold in the following ways. In the beginning, a set
of seemingly random coincidental events occur that set the stage for diverging into a new innovative
direction. Some of these gestating events are sufficiently large to “shock” certain attentive entrepreneurs
to launch an innovative venture by developing a proposal and obtaining funding for it. Soon after work
begins to develop the venture in an initially planned convergent direction, the process proliferates into a
divergent cycle of exploring new directions, changing goals, learning by discovery, pluralistic leadership,
and building new relationships. Problems, mistakes, and resource constraints frequently occur as these
divergent paths are pursued. They lead innovators into a convergent cycle of exploiting a given direction,
learning by testing, executing relationships with unitary leadership and goal consensus. This cycle of
convergent behavior may diverge again with further exploration of a chosen direction and if additional
resources permit. This innovation journey ends either in a convergent pattern of innovation
implementation, or the divergent behavior is terminated when resources run out or when political
opposition prevails to terminate the developmental effort.
While these processes are more pronounced in complex innovations, they are present in all the
innovations that we studied. These messy and complex processes require us to reconceptualize the
process of innovation, because the observed processes cannot be reduced to a simple sequence of stages
or phases as implied with the stage gate model that is used in many organizations for managing the
innovation process. Instead, Cheng and Van de Ven (1996) and Dooley and Van de Ven (1999; 2017)
present empirical evidence indicating that the innovation journey consists of a nonlinear cycle of
divergent and convergent activities that may repeat in unpredictable ways over time. The dimensionality
or complexity of this nonlinear cycle of divergent and convergent behavior dampens for the innovations
that ultimately get implemented. Thus, the innovation development journey begins in random, transitions
to chaotic, and ends in orderly patterns of behavior.
These findings suggest that entrepreneurs and managers cannot control innovation success, only
its odds by developing and practicing skills for traversing the obstacles encountered in divergent and
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convergent cycles of the journey. A useful analogy may be to imagine that the innovation journey is like
an uncharted river.
Most people cling to the river bank, afraid to let go and risk being carried along
by the river’s current. At a certain point, some people are willing to jump in and trust that
they can maneuver the river. While going with the flow of the river, they begin to look
ahead and guide their course onward, deciding where the course looks best, steering
around boulders and snags, and choosing which of the many channels and branches of the
river they prefer to follow. Because some have developed skills and practiced traversing
various river currents, falls, and obstacles, they maneuver the river better than others who
have not learned to swim. While this increases their odds of success, no one controls the
river.
This metaphor is helpful to make a few concluding observations. First, like a river the journey
entails maneuvering through stretches of divergent and convergent waters. In divergent waters the river
branches and expands in multiple dimensions and flows in chaotic or random patterns. Maneuvering
these stretches entails divergent search, learning by discovery, pluralistic leadership, and running in packs
with others to create new relationships and institutions for collective survival. Occasionally the river
converges in a particular direction, and flows in a more orderly periodic pattern. Many familiar principles
of rational management are useful for maneuvering and exploiting these stretches, including
implementing strategic goals, trial-and-error learning, unitary leadership, and executing agreements
within established institutions for competitive advantage.
Maneuvering transitions between divergent and convergent flows are particularly problematic for
two reasons. First, just when people gain some comfort and skill in going with a convergent flow, the
innovation river may transition again into a divergent pattern that requires very different managerial
skills. As a result, maneuvering the entire innovation journey requires developing ambidextrous
management skills. Second, like a river, the paths of these transitions are often unpredictable and beyond
the control of those floating down the uncharted river. However, unlike a river, innovation leaders can
intervene and place boundaries on divergent and convergent patterns with their resource investments,
organizational structuring, and selecting participants who have honed their skills in maneuvering the
obstacles in the innovation journey.
Finally, one of the more tragic findings from our studies is that entrepreneurs of innovations that
failed were not given opportunities to lead future innovations within their organizations. If innovation
success or failure is recognized to be a probabilistic process then it would more often be attributed to
factors beyond the control of innovators. This, in turn, would decrease the likelihood that the careers of
innovators in organizations will be stigmatized if their innovation fails, and increase the likelihood that
they will be given another chance to manage an organization’s future innovations. After all, one cannot
become a master or professional at anything if only one trial is permitted. Repeated trials over many
innovations are essential for learning to occur and for applying these learning experiences to subsequent
innovations. It is primarily through repeated trials and the accumulation of learning experiences across
these trials that an organization can build its repertoire of competencies to progressively increase its odds
of innovation success.
We need to develop ways to let managers practice innovation skills in relatively safe
environments. Management educators could act on this idea by developing training programs, possibly
with simulation exercises and cases, for managers to take before they embark on the innovation journey.
Innovation managers should have opportunities to hone their skills on “beginner slopes” by launching
small and inexpensive innovations before they strike out “on the Alps” by directing major and expensive
innovations that are central to the future viability of their organizations.
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References
Cheng, Y. & Van de Ven, A.H. 1996. Learning the i9nnovation journey: Order out of chaos? Organization
Science, 7, 6: 593-614.
Dooley, K. & Van de Ven, A.H. 1999. Explaining complex organizational dynamics. Organization
Science, 10, 3: 358-372.
Dooley, K. & Van de Ven, A.H. 2017. Cycles of divergence and convergence: Underlying processes of
organizational change and innovation, Chapter 36 in H. Tsoukas and A. Langley, The Sage
Handbook of Process Organization Studies, Sage LPublications (forthcoming).
Garud, R., Tuertscher, P. & Van de Ven, A.H. 2013. Perspectives on Innovation Processes, The Academy
of Management Annals, 7, 1: 773-817.
Van de Ven, A.H., Poolley, D.E., Garud, R. & Venkataraman, S. (1999; 2008). The Innovation Journey,
New York: Oxford Univ. Press.
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