Andrew H. Van de Ven

Central problems in the management of innovation

Innovation is defined as the development and implementation of new ideas by people who over time engage in transactions with others within an institutional order. This definition focuses on four basic factors new ideas, people, transactions, and institutional context. An understanding of how these factors are related leads to four basic problems confronting most general managers: 1 a human problem of managing attention, 2 a process problem in managing new ideas into good currency, 3 a structural problem of managing part-whole relationships, and 4 a strategic problem of institutional leadership. This paper discusses these four basic problems and concludes by suggesting how they fit together into an overall framework to guide longitudinal study of the management of innovation.

Determinants of Coordination Modes within Organizations

This paper classifies alternative mechanisms for coordinating work activities within organizations into impersonal, personal and group modes. It investigates how variations and interactions in the use of these coordination mechanisms and modes are explained by task uncertainty, interdependence and unit size. Nine hypotheses that relate these three determining factors to the use of the three coordination modes are developed in order to test some key propositions of Thompson (1967) and others on coordination at the work unit or departmental level of organization analysis. Research results from 197 work units within a large employment security agency largely support the hypotheses. The findings suggest that there are differences in degree and kind of influence of each determining factor on the mix of alternative coordination mechanisms used within organizational units.

Alternative forms of fit in contingency theory.

Support for this research was provided in part by the Wisconsin Job Service Division of the Department of Industry, Labor and Human Relations, the California Employment Department, and by the Program on Organizational Effectiveness of the Office of Naval Research under the contract number NOOO1 4-S4-K-001 6. This paper examines the selection, interaction, and systems approaches to fit in structural contingency theory. These are empirically examined as related to a taskcontingency theory of work-unit design in 629 employment security units in California and Wisconsin. Evidence was found to support the selection and systems approaches in these data but not the interaction approach. The generalizability of these findings is discussed in terms of using alternative approaches to fit to explain context-structureperformance relationships in contingency theory.

Central perspectives and debates in organization theory.

We appreciate the helpful suggestions on earlier drafts of this paper from Charles Fombrun, John Bryson, William Gomberg, and anonymousASQ reviewers. We also appreciate the support of the Center forthe Study of Organizational Innovation at the University of Pennsylvania and the Charles F. Kettering Foundation for release time to prepare this paper. The diverse schools of organizational thought are classified according to micro and macro levels of organizational analysis and deterministic versus voluntaristic assumptions of human nature to yield four basic perspectives: systemstructural, strategic choice, natural selection, and collective-action views of organizations. These four views represent qualitatively different concepts of organizational structure, behavior, change, and managerial roles. Six theoretical debates are then identified by systematically juxtaposing the four views against each other, and a partial reconciliation is achieved by bringing opposing viewpoints into dialectical relief. The six debates, which tend to be addressed singly and in isolation from each other in the literature, arethen integrated ata metatheoretical level. The framework presented thus attempts to overcome the problems associated with excessive theoretical compartmentalization by focusing on the interplay between divergent theoretical perspectives, but it also attempts to preserve the authenticity of distinctive viewpoints, thereby retaining the advantages associated with theoretical pluralism.*

A Group Process Model for Problem Identification and Program Planning

This article sets forth a group process approach useful for practicing administrators charged with a program development task. More specifically, meeting formats are suggested for involving the following critical reference groups in successive phases of program development: (1) clients (consumers or users) and first-line staff, in problem exploration; (2) external resource people and internal specialists, in knowledge exploration; (3) key administrators and resource controllers, in priority development and local adaptation; (4) organizational staff, in program proposal building; and (5) all constituencies, in final approval and evaluation designs. The meeting formats were suggested by contemporary small-group theory; the sequencing of the involvement of reference groups came from studies of community planning.

Alternative Approaches for Studying Organizational Change

Scholars hold different views about whether organizations consist of things or processes and about variance or process methods for conducting research. By combining these two dimensions, we develop a typology of four approaches for studying organizational change. Although the four approaches may be viewed as opposing or competing views, we see them as being complementary. Each approach focuses on different questions and provides a different — but partial — understanding of organizational change. We argue that coordinating the pluralistic insights from the four approaches provides a richer understanding of organization change than any one approach provides by itself.

The Effectiveness of Nominal, Delphi, and Interacting Group Decision Making Processes

The conventional interacting group is compared with nominal and delphi groups in terms of the quantity of ideas generated and perceived satisfaction of participants. On an applied fact-finding prob...

Research on the management of innovation : the Minnesota studies

This is a reprint of a classic work of research on innovation first published in 1989. Resulting from the Minnesota Innovation Research Program (MIRP), the book includes a revised and expanded Preface and will complement the three other books growing out of the program, all published by Oxford: The Innovation Journey (1999), Organizational Change Processes: Theory and Methods for Research (2000), and Handbook of Organizational Change and Development (coming 2001).

A Collective Action Model of Institutional Innovation

We introduce a collective action model of institutional innovation. This model, based on converging perspectives from the technology innovation management and social movements literature, views institutional change as a dialectical process in which partisan actors espousing conflicting views confront each other and engage in political behaviors to create and change institutions. The model represents an important complement to existing models of institutional change. We discuss how these models together account for various stages and cycles of institutional change.

Designing New Business Startups: Entrepreneurial, Organizational, and Ecological Considerations:

The startups of 14 educational-software companies are investigated from three different perspectives: entrepreneurial, organizational, and ecological. The performance and stages of development of the new firms are viewed from each perspective. The entrepreneurial perspective concentrates on the characteristics and background of the founding individual. The organizational perspective looks at the planning and initial development processes of the firms. The ecological perspective uses the population of firms as a level of analysis and is concerned with the success of the industry as a whole. These three perspectives each contribute significantly to the designing of startups of new organizations.