Innovation as a Management Question: Can Innovation Be Managed?

Introduction

The topic of innovation management has been progressively addressed in management literature. The question that the literature debated for a long time is: Can innovation be managed? (Tidd & Bessant, 2018). Innovation is a universal activity linked to growth and survival, and is understood as a process. This understanding shapes the way by which innovation can be managed. The innovation underlying process is seen to be common to all organizations. At the process core, certain activities and stages exist (Cohn, 2013). The challenge that any organization faces is finding proper ways of managing the innovation process to provide good solutions to the renewal problem. Different conditions may lead to different solutions. Despite these variations, the main pattern of innovation as stages and phases remains the same (Tidd & Bessant, 2018).

It may appear that innovation cannot be managed due to its complicated, uncertain, and apparently random process. Issues exist in developing and polishing new knowledge, adapting and integrating it to new products/processes, supporting and diffusing the innovation, and gaining market acceptance and sustainability. Thus, the innovation process represents the place where, if anything can go wrong, there’s a very good chance that it will (Fagerberg et al., 2012; Rafols et al., 2012). Scholarly research in innovation over the years shows that, despite technical challenges, the majority of innovations fail because of weaknesses in the way the process is managed. Success in innovation appears to depend on two key elements: Technical resources (e.g., knowledge, human resources, and financial resources) as well as the capabilities the company possesses to manage these resources (Tidd & Bessant, 2018).

Several scholars emphasize that innovation management is a learned capability. They believe that an “underlying pattern of success” can be found for innovation. Although the failure rate of innovation is not low, some innovation succeeds. Some companies seem to have learned how to manage and respond to innovation in a successful way. This means that a successful pattern of innovation management can improve chances of success (O’Reilly et al., 2019; Oliva & Kotabe, 2019). Although innovation will remain unpredictable and complex, finding a proper management pattern for its process will create favorable conditions under which companies can successfully find solutions for multiple challenges. Therefore, innovation is a management question (Tidd & Bessant, 2018).

Creating a pattern for innovation management activities brings up the concept of routine. Organizations create a specific pattern of behavior that becomes “the way we do things around here” as an outcome of reinforcement and repetition. These patterns become part of the organizational culture. This routine depends on the learning capability of the organization and emerges due to continuous experiments and accumulated experience around what seems to work well (Tidd & Bessant, 2018). Thus, successful innovation management is fundamentally about creating, enforcing, and improving effective routines. Learning to do this comes from recognizing and understanding effective routines (whether developed in-house or observed in another enterprise) and facilitating their emergence across the organization (Tidd & Bessant, 2018).