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Articles successfully submitted to and presented at IMC 2015: The International Management Conference

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In the last issue of 2015, the editorial was titled “Winter is coming: The dawn of Innovation?“ As almost 2 years have gone by, this topic was revisited. So why not wonder how innovation was going around this same time of the year? In trying to answer this question, a visit to Google© Trends revealed an interesting and possibly unexpected chart that is illustrated in figure 1. (...)

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The story of societal progress has long been acknowledged to involve two brothers - management research and management practice (Beyer, 1982). Although, reared by the same knowledge core (Poole and Van de Ven, 1989; Wallin and von Krogh, 2010), the brothers in a display of their contrasting lives behave independently, often disparately. Their distinct behaviour has prompted scholars to report that ’most of what management researchers do utterly fails to resonate with management practice’ (Bansal et al., 2012, p. 73). Those observing the relationship unfold have been concerned of this disconnect for decades (Banks et al., 2016; Hambrick, 1994; Shapiro, Kirkman and Courtney, 2007). Gordon and Howell (1959) posited that universities and business schools need to be ’better informed and more scholarly faculties that are capable of carrying on more significant research, and with greater appreciation of the contributions to be made to the development of business competence’ (p.425). (...)

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Were you ever asked by a manager to ‘do what you want’, where you felt free to innovate? Did it feel like freedom? Maybe you felt encouraged since you could now experiment your idea, but did it mean that your performance was now on the radar? Could you then stay true to your vision or did you feel the need to compromise so that the ‘numbers lined up’? Either way, you should know that you are not alone. Arguably, we are in an age of paradox1 where simultaneous contradic- tions are all too common. Innovation paradox arises when “the aggressive pursuit of operational excellence and incremental innovation crowds out the possibility of creating ground-breaking innovations” (Davila & Epstein, 2014, p.2). Often these contradictions are meaningful on their own merit but when interdependent on each other, they create tensions in economic, social, environmental and ethical decision-making. In previous editorials, we have shared how digital innovations and societal disparity across the world are influencing strategic decision-making and shifting the innovation mindset. We now stretch the boundaries by suggesting that paradigms relying on economic trade-offs and shared-value that have shaped conventional organisational strategies are no longer sufficient to guide paradoxical tensions in decision-making. (...)

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Wisdom of the crowds, Technological capabilities and Functional alignment, which when recognised and utilised in innovation processes, can unlock the ability to source, develop and commercialise ideas at rapid pace. The phenomenon is known as technological convergence. By definition, technological convergence is described as the process by which Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs) converge towards new and more unified markets. This convergence often leverages the three dimensions of innovation – economic, technical and functional. On the economic side, the focus of a focal firm is on maximising profits with minimal costs under resource constraints brought about in-part by liberalisation of markets. In this regard, open innovation which involves harnessing wisdom of the crowds at the fuzzy front-end of the innovation process has increasingly been promoted as a pragmatic mechanism for accessing widely distributed knowledge (Thanasopon, Papdopoulos & Vidgen, 2016), in large firms (Brunswicker & Chesbrough, 2018) and SMEs (Vanhaverbeke, Frattini, Roijakkers & Usman, 2018). On the technical side, the main driver has been the rise of enabling technologies, at times revolutioning social behaviour but mostly brought about through incremental shifts in technical abilities. Finally, convergence is realised through functional alignment, characterised by integration of computational, behaviour and communication factors in a unique value-proposition delivered through new product or new service (Canals, Torres & Borés, 2001). The growing prominence of technological convergence means firms can no longer afford to work in silos or rely on proprietory waterfall solutions to achieve competitive advantage and influence societal progress. Here, we build on our July 2018 editorial which emphasised the cumulative importance of management research and management practice working together for societal progress. W-T-F is offered here as the fundamental trilogy that both managers and researchers need to address to survive and thrive in an increasingly digitised and globally-connected world. (...)

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Innovation is a journey that is full of challenges. It is demanding, but we need to keep inspirational aspects in mind, such as the ones President Kennedy expressed in his predestinated “sticky” (Heath and Heath, 2007) speech in 1962 about sending a man to the moon. Since the seminal works of Schumpeter (1934), innovation has been widely acknowledged as a key driver of competitiveness, economic growth and welfare. There is a wealth of empirical evidence supporting a positive relationship between innovation and firm-level performance in the academic literature (e.g. Crépon et al., 1998; Griffith et al., 2006; Lööf and Heshmati, 2002). At firm level, innovation has long been recognized as a competitive advantage and a key driver of economic performance (Schumpeter, 1934). Innovation also lies at the very heart of policy mechanisms to achieve a smart, inclusive and sustainable growth in economies, as envisioned by the Europe 2020 strategy (European Commission, 2013).(...)