Organizing for Innovation
Critically reflect on and deal with the literature in relevant streams of research such as knowledge management,
R&D and NPD management, innovation management, and technological and strategic change.
Week 1: Introduction
Background Material Week 1
What is organizing for innovation?
● Concept of organization and innovation.
● Organization: systems of coordinated action among individuals and groups whose
preferences, information, interests or knowledge differ. E.g.: universities, companies,
non-profits, government agencies and open contractual organizations. Coordinate to attain
common goals.
● Important OG’s can be designed: adjust elements such as structured, centralization, SOP’s,
task structure, deal with division of labors, culture on risk taking and failure, etc. Adjust and
combine elements to answer “How do we organize?
● Why are some organizational design choices better or worse for specific innovation outcomes under
certain conditions. Think of outcomes like quantity, quality, speed or efficiency.
● Some elements are easier to adjust then others and choices on elements so OG design
influences OG performance and function.
● Interest is how do OG designs influence Innovation outcomes, under certain conditions?
Depends on specific outcome we desire + type of innovation + contingencies (environment).
Attention to understand the causal mechanism why does OG design affects innovation
outcome.
Main insights
The video offers key insights into the relationship between organizational design and
innovation. It discusses the critical role of organization in fostering innovation, emphasizing the
importance of effective coordination under varying conditions. The video further explores the
complexity of organizational design, explaining that it involves a range of elements, such as
organizational structure and the degree of centralization. However, the video also notes that while
some elements are more easily adjustable than others, all of them significantly impact the
organization's overall functionality and effectiveness. The course centers on the causal mechanisms
through which organizational design influences innovative outcomes, highlighting the necessity of
considering different types of innovation, varied innovative outcomes, and relevant environmental
contingencies. All in order to answer the question how does a organization design affect innovation
under certain conditions?
, Lecture 1: Introduction & Concept Basis
Introduction Contents
Exercise on Organizations and Problem Solving: collaboration
Organization Routines and Capabilities
› Experience accumulation and learning takes time and deliberate investments in knowledge
articulation and codification
› Transactive memory (learning who knows what and can do what)
› Do the existing capabilities match with the requirements set by the environment?
o A simple problem doesn’t require recombination of information, it requires creativity (creating
a new knowledge element)
o Categorization: decomposable problem, requires no creativity (knowledge retrieval/acquisition
problem)
How do organizations influence information processing
› Organizations are goal-oriented (shared goals)
› Organizational roles and culture
› Division of labor and integration of effort
› Information flows and knowledge transfer
› Incentivizing collaboration
› Coordination of activities via routines and capabilities
How to organize for innovation?
› Why are some organizational design choices better or worse for specific innovation outcomes under
certain conditions (contingencies)?
Team chartering
• Goals: What concrete outcomes do we intend to accomplish as a team? What level of quality? What
learning objectives? What grade?
• Agreements: What do we expect from one another? What shared commitments do we want to put
in place in order to ensure we function well? (e.g., How we go about sharing information, meeting,
making decisions, etc.)?
• Support: What kind of support (e.g., guidance, resources, information, etc.) do we think we will
need from others to succeed in achieving our purpose and objectives?
,Week 2: Organization Knowledge Base for Innovation
Background Material Week 2
1. OG knowledge base and innovation
Knowledge Base; what the organization knows, consists of individual knowledge elements. Sometimes new
knowledge elements get added, but existing bases can also be recombined. In this way, innovations can be
created.
Three problems:
➢Having trouble with coming up with new knowledge elements, is called ‘knowledge creation problem’.
➢When you are recombining knowledge elements, there’s the problem of ‘knowledge transfer’ that you need
to solve. Different elements reside in different departments, how do you share the elements effectively?
➢There is also something called ‘knowledge retention problem’, how do you keep the knowledge elements in
the company? For example, individual employees can forget things they have learned or methods they once
used.
How challenging these problems are, is being influenced by organizational design choices. Outcomes:
➢ Creation: New knowledge is generated in organizations
➢ Retention: Embedding knowledge in a repository so that it exhibits some persistence over time (database,
document, routines)
➢ Transfer: Experience acquired in one part of the organization affects another
Topic points
● OG knowledge base, key challenges and organize for Innovation.
● The key to innovative is on how we organize knowledge
● Knowledge elements as building blocks
● OG know base: what OG knows, with many individuals know elements: independent pieces of
know, building blocks of innovation.
● New innovations result from new knowledge which can be conceptualized by adding new
know elements to the know base. Often innovation happens not from building new blocks of
know but recombination of old ones, existing ones. Recombine in new ways, creating
innovative outcomes.
Disperse knowledge
● Challenge is on disperse knowledge within OG, not one individual knows all of it
● Different knowledge structure: it shows coupling of elements (see first week article). Showing
a dispersion of patent, Intel maps what company knows. We can distinguish clusters within
knowledge structures. For efficient use knowledge needs to be organized.
, Challenges
● By recombining to achieve innovation, one faces the challenge of knowledge transfer. When
innovation comes from adding a new building block there’s the challenge of knowledge
creation.
● Know transfer + Know creation= fundamental challenges in creation of innovation
● 3rd challenge knowledge retention problem = how OG retains what they created, if not
retained info decays. Face challenges with organizational design choices
Management knowledge to innovative
● 3 management outcomes: creation, retention, transfer
● Creation: new know. One unit creates own experiment
● Retention: not only key employees but embedding in a firm’s report.
● Transfer: transfer within departments, occur through mechanism such as employements or
external R&D
2. Levels of Knowledge
What is knowledge?
A. Types of knowledge: on nature and content
Typologies are not mutually exclusive. A type of knowledge influences how to innovate within an OG:
different types of arrangements function with different OG structures, leading to different results.
Tacit vs explicit knowledge
● Tacit: complex, codify and hard to store and transfer. Most know is tacit. Need for experience
and practice to learn. Acquire knowledge through experience.
● Explicit: codified, transferred, easily articulated.
Technological, managerial vs market knowledge
● Technological: need to process know-how,
● Managerial: right managerial to coordinate innovative activities effectively. How should we
organize our OG.
● Market: understand users and competition. Need for products to meet requirements.
Categorization helps understand and describe innovation problems. Where do issues lie, where do we
lack of knowledge.
