Radical innovation: crossing knowledge boundaries with ...

clashing keys became less necessary and new and more efficient keyboard layouts
were designed. However, with the advent of touch-typing, the cost for businesses to
retrain their workers to use different keyboard layouts prevented their uptake. It was
cheaper to upgrade their typewriter to a new QWERTY model than upgrade the skills
of their staff to another keyboard layout. Here social structures and cultural values are
shown to lead to the potential ‘lock-in’ of particular designs and to inhibit innovation.
Through stories of success and failure both these examples point to the need for
innovators to take the social and cultural context into account in order to design
successful innovations. And these descriptions of innovation concur with NESTA’s
findings that innovation can involve the reapplication of old ideas as much as the
generation of new ones. As with the policy literature summarised above, literature in
management studies also tends to focus on the relationship between research and
market, this time locating ‘effective strategies’ in the organizational form that a firm
takes. However, literature in this area tends to be more specific about the different
organizational forms that collaboration might take and their relative merits, in contrast
with the lack of differentiation between modes of collaboration in the policy
literature.
For example the Arthur D. Little Third Innovation Excellence Survey states that both
direct customer contact and cross-functional teams are two of the factors which
differentiate the best performing firms in terms of innovation from the worst (Beyer et
al. 2005). A pamphlet published by InnovationPoint LLC outlines five different
organizational structures that encourage innovation and assesses their relative values
(Kaplan and Winby nd.). These include venture boards which draw on knowledge of
experts inside and outside the firm; innovation councils that comprise a small crossfunctional
body of senior managers from different firms who work together to solve
problems; thought leader resource networks, consisting of a network of thinkers and
practitioners from research institutions, firms, and think tanks who might be called on
at any time; open innovation networks, which involve relationships between the
organization and external partners such as universities, academic research institutions,
government and private labs and individual entrepreneurs; Innovation Communities
of Practice, consisting of groups of stakeholders from inside and outside the
organization who share a particular interest and meet regularly to advance personal
and organizational goals.
There is also evidence of more critical reflection on the new discourse of networking
and collaboration in literature from this sector. A recent working paper from Harvard
Business School argues that ‘ambidextrous’ organization designs that involve the
linking of research projects at a management level, are more effective at facilitating
innovation than cross-functional or spinout designs (Tushman et al. 2006). And an
ESRC funded project into the organization of innovation found that there is no added
benefit gained from an organization pursuing both external knowledge sourcing and
developing cross-functional teams over pursuing one of these strategies on its own
(Love 2007, see also Love, Roper, and Mangiarotti 2006, Roper, Love, and Du 2007).
The NESTA reports reviewed above also make evident the different forms that
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