Fariborz Damanpour

Organizational Innovation: A Meta-Analysis Of Effects Of Determinants and Moderators

A meta-analysis of the relationships between organizational innovation and 13 of its potential determinants resulted in statistically significant associations for specialization, functional differe...

Organizational Innovation and Performance: The Problem of "Organizational Lag"

Fariborz Damanpour and William M. Evan The organizational lag model, which postulates that a discrepancy exists between the rates of adoption of technical and administrative innovations, is applied to study the -impact of adoption of types of innovation on organizational performance. Four hypotheses were derived from this -model and were tested in a sample of 85 public libraries. It was found that: (1) libraries adopt technical innovations at a faster rate than administrative innovations; (2) administrative and technical innovations have a higher correlation in high-performance organizations than in low-performance organizations; (3) the degree of organizational lag is inversely related to organizational performance; and (4) the adoption of administrative innovations tends to triggerthe adoption of technical innovations more readily than the reverse.,

The Adoption of Technological, Administrative, and Ancillary Innovations: Impact of Organizational Factors

The influence of six organizationalfactors on the adoption of three types of innovations was examined in public libraries. It wasfound that (a) all factors together were a better predictor of technological than administrative or ancillary innovations, and (b) specialization and organizational slack had a stronger effect on technological innovations than the other two types, whereas administrative intensity and organizational size had a stronger effect on administrative innovations. It is concluded that differentiation between types of innovations and stages of adoption is essential in developing realistic theories of organizational innovations.

Combinative Effects of Innovation Types and Organizational Performance: A Longitudinal Study of Service Organizations

Innovation research suggests that innovation types have different attributes, determinants, and effects. This study focuses on consequences of adoption of three types of innovation (service, technological process, and administrative process) in service organizations. Its main thesis is that the impact of innovation on organizational performance depends on compositions of innovation types over time. We examine this proposition by analysing innovative activity in a panel of 428 public service organizations in the UK over four years. Our findings suggest that focus on adopting a specific type of innovation every year is detrimental, consistency in adopting the same composition of innovation types over the years has no effect, and divergence from the industry norm in adopting innovation types could possibly be beneficial to organizational performance. We discuss the implications of these findings for theory and research on innovation types.

Theories of organizational structure and innovation adoption: the role of environmental change

Abstract Innovation scholars face an enduring research problem: how to make models that are testable, yet reflect the complexity of real business environments. Typically, researchers of organizational innovation define their research by focusing on one dimension of innovation—type of innovation, radicalness of innovation, or stage of innovation—at a time. In reality, these dimensions overlap, which partly explains why past theories of the relationships between organizational structure and innovation have produced inconsistent results. In this paper, we develop a more complex model for structure–innovation relationships. First, we define four environmental conditions, using stability and predictability variables of environmental change. Second, we articulate organizational structure and innovation characteristics that would hold for firms under each of our four sets of conditions. This basic framework allows us to compare and subsequently to extend, the three theories of structure and innovation that address the dimensions of innovation mentioned above. Finally, we advance a series of propositions to predict the structural characteristics that facilitate adoption of innovations of different types at different stages, under four conditions of environmental change.

Managerial Innovation: Conceptions, Processes, and Antecedents

The expansive research on innovation in organizations has primarily followed a technological imperative, postulating that organizations organize their innovation efforts through research and development (R&D) activities. Theories of innovation are thus shaped mosdy from the studies of technology-based innovations in the manufacturing sector, yet are applied in all contexts. This article advocates research on managerial innovations - new approaches to devise strategy and structure of tasks and units, modify the organizations management processes and administrative systems, motivate and reward organizational members, and enable organizational adaptation and change. We examine the conceptual development, generation and adoption processes, antecedents, and influences of managerial innovation on organizational conduct. By increasing an understanding of managerial innovation, this article aims to complement existing theories of innovation derived from the studies of technological innovations and thus help extend and advance theory and research on innovation process and outcome in organizations.

The Application of External Knowledge: Organizational Conditions for Exploration and Exploitation

A firms ability to acquire and exploit external knowledge is often critical to achieving and sustaining a competitive advantage. In this study, we adopt a multi-dimensional view of absorptive capacity and focus specifically on the application of external knowledge that has been obtained via university-firm collaborations. We examine various organizational conditions that we propose influence a firms ability to apply external knowledge for explorative and exploitative innovations. We collected data by a survey of firms in industries that frequently work with university research centres (URCs) and from publicly available sources. Results show that predictors of exploration and exploitation of the application of external knowledge differ. Surprisingly, technological relatedness, a common measure of absorptive capacity, is negatively associated with the application of external knowledge to explorative innovations, indicating that knowledge from more distant sources is applied more to exploration. Results also indicate that the effects of two external learning capabilities (prior experience with URCs and technological capability) on knowledge application are moderated in such a way by the tacitness of the knowledge transferred that experience is a stronger predictor when the knowledge is more explicit and technological capability is a stronger predictor when the knowledge is more tacit. We discuss the implications of these findings for research on the application of external knowledge.

An Integration of Research Findings of Effects of Firm Size and Market Competition on Product and Process Innovations

Product and process innovations have been studied as distinct phenomena whose introduction is influenced differently by firm and market conditions. This study reviews and quantitatively integrates the findings of the empirical studies of the associations of firm size and market competition with product and process innovations. The accumulation of research results and subgroup analyses of construct measurement do not provide evidence of substantial differences in the strength of the influence of size or competition on the two innovation types. Implications of the results for future research on innovation types as distinct or integrative phenomena are discussed.

Patterns of generation and adoption of innovation in organizations: Contingency models of innovation attributes

Abstract This study addresses the debate over the occurrence and the applicability of unitary sequence and multiple sequence patterns in the innovation process in organizations. Our general argument is that each patterns explanatory power hinges on identifiable contingencies. These influencing factors can and should be taken into account by both theorists and managers. Focusing on two types of innovation processes, generation and adoption, we use two innovation attributes—complexity and type—to determine the suitability of each pattern to a specific innovation process. It is proposed that generation and adoption of simple innovations, generation of technical innovations, and adoption of administrative innovations is adequately explained by the unitary sequence pattern. However, generation and adoption of complex innovations, generation of administrative innovations, and adoption of technical innovations is better described by the multiple sequence pattern. Implications for theory development and management practice are then discussed.

The impact of organizational context on innovation adoption in commercial banks

This study examines the linkages between nonstructured factors in an organizations context and dimensions of innovation adoption in organizations. Elements of an organizations context included in this study are size, geographic scope, and product scope; dimensions of innovation are magnitude and speed of adoption and product and process types of innovation. The relationships among these variables are examined by a sampling of empirical data culled from 101 commercial banks in four states: New York; New Jersey; Connecticut; and Massachusetts. We found that: (1) organization size and geographic scope have a stronger association with magnitude than the speed of adoption, while product scope is more strongly linked to the speed of adoption; (2) geographic and product scope influence the propensity to adopt product and process innovations differently; and (3) the pattern of innovation adoption differs among various types of banks.