Call for Papers
Unpacking the Innovation-Performance Link: Challenges for Organisation Research
26th EGOS Colloquium, Sub-theme 36, Lisbon, July 1-3, 2010.
DEADLINE FOR SUBMISSION OF EXTENDED ABSTRACTS (max 3000 words):
JANUARY 10th, 2010.
Stefano Brusoni, Bocconi University, Milan, Italy
stefano.brusoni@unibocconi.it
Dean A. Hennessy, Tilburg University, The Netherlands
hennessy@uvt.nl
Marius T.H. Meeus, Tilburg University, The Netherlands
m.t.h.meeus@uvt.nl
The idea that innovation leads to positive economic performance has become a sort of article of faith in recent years. Managers and policy makers consider innovation as the main strategy to react to increasing competitive pressures from fast growing economies. However, empirical evidence showing that innovating organisations outperform non-innovating ones remains scant and scattered. Due to measurement and data problems the link between innovation and performance is too often simply assumed. Though there have been insights from the economics literature into the link between the two, economic models have tended to focus narrowly on certain easily measurable aspects of innovation such as R&D effort and its effect on labour productivity. But such models fail to get at a deeper understanding of the micro-foundations of innovation and the behavioural processes that would, for instance, provide a more nuanced understanding of the link to performance. We therefore need models that go beyond the simple profit motive, and price signals, which drive most economic models of innovation.
Organization scholars have addressed some of these shortcomings. In general, a behavioural theory of the firm suggests that the greater past performance is above certain goals/aspiration levels, the lower the likelihood of innovative efforts, which can feed forward to future (under) performance. And the more companies underperform relative to their aspirations, the more likely they are to invest in innovation. However some performance mechanisms can have an ambiguous effect on innovation as research has shown. Still, our grasp of the link between innovation and performance remains tenuous due in part to its complexity – there are too many intervening processes, time lags, feedbacks, incentive structures, agency problems etc.
In this track, we aim to reconcile conflicting results in prior research, and we also hope to open up a dialogue for promising future research directions in this area. We welcome papers that focus on organizational conditions - managerial, structural, cultural, and processual (especially knowledge processing/learning) that might stabilize the innovation-performance link. We invite both empirical and conceptual papers that deal with the behavioural, social and cognitive aspects of the link between innovation and performance, and that rely on different methodologies and deal with research topics such as:
- How can organization theories model and integrate performance cues and innovation?
- What mechanisms mediate between innovation and performance – especially in times of environmental instability and uncertainty: e.g. adapting aspirations, threat rigidity, temporal stability of R&D investments, planned alternation of exploration and exploitation?
- Strategic and managerial challenges such as:
- How is the processing of performance cues integrated with absorptive capacities and the dynamic capabilities of companies?
- How well can performance cues be processed and translated into effective innovation strategies, and R&D programs?
- Do underperformers indeed invest more in R&D and innovation?
- Do sectors in crisis adapt their innovation or learning targets
- To what extent do companies struggle with inconsistent performance cues, especially under conditions of environmental instability and uncertainty?
- To what extent do companies in sectors in severe crisis recoup their innovative efforts?
- Which alternative 'processes' (e.g. signal and information processing, incentive and governance mechanisms, learning processes of different kinds, capabilities and routines, etc.) moderate the innovation-performance link?
- What kinds of models and methods enable us to cope with the causal ambiguity in the relationship between innovation and performance?
Best regards,
Stefano, Dean and Marius
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Dean Hennessy
Faculty of Economics and Business, and
The Center for Innovation Research (CIR)
Tilburg University
+31 13 466-3104