Deborah Dougherty

Sustained product innovation in large, mature organizations: Overcoming innovation-to-organization problems.

We examined problems with sustained product innovation in 15 firms that averaged 96 years of age, 54,000 employees, and

Information Technology and the Changing Fabric of Organization

9.4 billion in annual revenues. Findings reveal that the inability to connec...

Early planned institution of biventricular mechanical circulatory support results in improved outcomes compared with delayed conversion of a left ventricular assist device to a biventricular assist device

Technology has been an important theme in the study of organizational form and function since the 1950s. However, organization sciences 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. Organizing no longer needs to take place around hierarchy and the collection, storage, and distribution of information as was the case with “command and control” bureaucracies in the past. The adoption of innovations in information technology (IT) and organizational practices since the 1990s now make it possible to organize around what can be done with information. These changes are not the result of information technologies per se, but of the combination of their features with organizational arrangements and practices that support their use. Yet concepts and theories of organizational form and function remain remarkably silent about these changes. Our analysis offers five affordances---visualizing entire work processes, real-time/flexible product and service innovation, virtual collaboration, mass collaboration, and simulation/synthetic reality---that can result from the intersection of technology and organizational features. We explore how these affordances can result in new forms of organizing. Examples from the articles in this special issue “Information Technology and Organizational Form and Function” are used to show the kinds of opportunities that are created in our understanding of organizations when the “black boxes” of technology and organization are simultaneously unpacked.

Organizing Ecologies of Complex Innovation

OBJECTIVE It is generally accepted that patients who require biventricular assist device support have poorer outcomes than those requiring isolated left ventricular assist device support. However, it is unknown how the timing of biventricular assist device insertion affects outcomes. We hypothesized that planned biventricular assist device insertion improves survival compared with delayed conversion of left ventricular assist device support to biventricular assist device support. METHODS We reviewed and compared outcomes of 266 patients undergoing left ventricular assist device or biventricular assist device placement at the University of Pennsylvania from April 1995 to June 2007. We subdivided patients receiving biventricular assist devices into planned biventricular assist device (P-BiVAD) and delayed biventricular assist device (D-BiVAD) groups based on the timing of right ventricular assist device insertion. We defined the D-BiVAD group as any failure of isolated left ventricular assist device support. RESULTS Of 266 patients who received left ventricular assist devices, 99 (37%) required biventricular assist device support. We compared preoperative characteristics, successful bridging to transplantation, survival to hospital discharge, and Kaplan-Meier 1-year survival between the P-BiVAD (n = 71) and D-BiVAD (n = 28) groups. Preoperative comparison showed that patients who ultimately require biventricular support have similar preoperative status. Left ventricular assist device (n = 167) outcomes in all categories exceeded both P-BiVAD and D-BiVAD group outcomes. Furthermore, patients in the P-BiVAD group had superior survival to discharge than patients in the D-BiVAD group (51% vs 29%, P < .05). One-year and long-term Kaplan-Meier survival distribution confirmed this finding. There was also a trend toward improved bridging to transplantation in the P-BiVAD (n = 55) versus D-BiVAD (n = 22) groups (65% vs 45%, P = .10). CONCLUSION When patients at high risk for failure of isolated left ventricular assist device support are identified, proceeding directly to biventricular assist device implantation is advised because early institution of biventricular support results in dramatic improvement in survival.

Managing Your Core Incompetencies for Corporate Venturing

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 products and services in ecologies such as health care or energy are complex or comprise many parts with unknown interactions. New products, knowledge, business models, and applications all emerge unpredictably over considerable time periods, as various agents in the ecologies of innovation interact with and react to the actions of others. However, the existing organizing structure in these ecologies stifles emergence and precludes much innovation, simply because theory and practice do not adequately address how to organize for complex innovation. We develop a preliminary model for organizing ecologies of complex innovation. We suggest that innovations can continually emerge productively if people work locally in ecologies to set and solve problems of orchestrating knowledge capabilities across the ecology, strategizing across the ecology to create new businesses and applications, and developing public policies to embrace ambiguity. Using examples from biopharmaceuticals and alternative energy, we develop specific organizing ideas that can be examined and elaborated upon. This new direction for organization science integrates existing ideas around a new kind of organizing and shows how organization science can add real value in addressing major challenges of public welfare and safety in the 21st century.

Systems of organizational sensemaking for sustained product innovation

Internal ventures and a firms 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 difficult to achieve, because a scaffolding of reified rules, called core incompetencies, had grown around the competencies to dominate thought and action. Some ways to break out of the core incompetencies are developed from the successful efforts, and summarized in the discussion.

Bridging Social Constraint and Social Action to Design Organizations for Innovation

Abstract 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: (1) frame linking as hands-on practices of value creation; and (2) loosely couple three tensions between tacit and articulated knowledge across organizational levels to draw in, exploit, and recreate knowledge for innovation. We contrast sensemaking systems in innovative versus non-innovative organizations, and draw implications for theory and practice.

Digital Science and Knowledge Boundaries in Complex Innovation

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 constraint emphasize boundaries, authority, and reward mechanisms, while designs based on social action emphasize emergence, knowledgeable action, and self-fulfillment. This analysis applies a design science framework to reveal the incommensurate construction principles in the bifurcated designs. Construction principles are imperative statements for action that bridge organization theory and organization design, and highlight deeper meanings behind design guidelines. The construction principles for innovation evoke different patterns of managerial work, emphasizing either direct managerial agency while constraining employees or indirect shaping and enabling. I develop three alternate construction principles based on the mutual constitution of constraint and action. These principles capture some of the insights of the two separated sets of principles, but also reflect a coherent understanding of social order in organizations and organizing.

Beyond socio-technical systems: introduction to the special issue

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 compounds, diseases, and human biology. We interviewed 85 scientists and managers working on drug discovery to understand how they deal with complexity. We find a major knowledge fault line between digital scientists, who use computers as laboratories and manipulate signs, and therapy scientists, who use conventional laboratories and manipulate physical material. We build on research on epistemic cultures and knowing in practice to develop empirically grounded theory for the role of digital science in complex innovation. We propose that digitalization creates a new form of knowledge that provides essential complementary insights for complex innovation that cannot exist otherwise. However, digitalization also creates new knowledge boundaries that concern central activities of innovation. These boundaries highlight challenges of complex innovation that digital sciences can help address, but only if the innovation activities are transformed so that digital and therapy sciences can integrate their complementary knowledge.

When it comes to product innovation, what is so bad about bureaucracy?

Abstract 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.