The Innovation Journey. . - Other Reviews - book review

Administrative Science Quarterly,  Sept, 2001  by Elaine Romanelli

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The Innovation Journey. Andrew H. Van de Ven, Douglas E. Polley, Raghu Garud, and Sankaran Venkataraman. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. 423 pp. $35.00.

Over a period of more than 17 years, the Minnesota Innovation Research Program (MIRP) conducted 14 longitudinal studies of innovation processes in diverse settings spanning public and private, large and small, and old and new organizations. By any measure or standard of assessment, the investigations stand as landmarks in the study of complex organizational processes (of any sort) and testimony to the ability f organizational researchers to target, productively and without gross simplification, some of the most important and difficult-to-observe phenomena in organizations. Today, and for the foreseeable future, any serious student of innovation processes in organizations must read and absorb both the content and the analytical commentary of the MIRP studies

At issue in The Innovation Journey, what the MIRP researchers call the "capstone" in the trilogy of books on these investigations, is what has been learned, when all is said and done. What can we say, more or less definitively, about innovation processes in complex organizations? What important questions remain to be answered? And, perhaps, what theory should govern future investigations, studies that should attempt to specify and to confirm or disconfirm more rigorously the key findings and insights of the MIRP studies?

The answers, it seems, are as complicated as the phenomenon itself. Although I found much to commend in this book, I also found it maddeningly difficult to read. As might be expected for such a long project, many researchers were involved, studying many different aspects of the innovation process. I was hoping, for this third book, that the authors would take a long view, distilling basic lessons from the 14 studies to present a general theory of the innovation process in complex organization, relying on previous publications for explication of sub-theories and details about elements of the process. The long view is here, I think, but finding it requires a very thorough reading and, in my case at least, a lot of skipping around in the chapters.

Chapter 1 begins as if the authors were in the middle of an ongoing conversation. In little more than two pages, the authors reject two major themes in prior research on innovation processes. They reject the first--that innovation unfolds along a path of orderly developmental stages--because it places undue emphasis on the "stability" of processes and because it does not reflect their central uncertainty and complexity. The second--that innovation is fundamentally a random process--assumes, problematically we gather, that the source of innovation is external to the system; moreover, the assumption of randomness leaves us with little managerial recourse other than to expose the organization to as many blind variations as possible. Underlying these rejections is surely a deep and sophisticated understanding of issues and problems in the study of complex organizational processes. Such brief treatment, however, can only hint at the theoretical complexity of the innovation process. The uninitiated reader would be forced to seek out the original works (and there are only a few citations supplied) and even then would be left to puzzle out, on his or her own, the validity of the criticisms presented here.

In place of these theories, the authors suggest that the process of innovation development may be "the result of a nonlinear dynamic system ... chaos as an alternative explanation of the innovation journey" (p. 5). Here, though we learn, in just one paragraph, that dynamic systems theory distinguishes "five temporal patterns ... in a time series of innovation development events: fixed (static), periodic (cyclical), chaotic (strange), colored noise (pink, brown, or black), or random chance (white noise)" and that prior theory has emphasized just the first two of the patterns or the fifth, little insight is gained about what innovation processes would look like according to a nonlinear dynamic, or chaotic system. Thus, by page 5, I think I know what the authors want to say, but I am unenlightened about how to understand the innovation process as a chaotic or nonlinear dynamic system or why it solves some of the problems in prior theory. The remainder of this chapter does not elaborate.

Turning quickly to chapter 2, in hopes of gaining a better understanding, I learned that there are, in fact, three temporal "periods" that commonly appear in the innovation process--initiation, developmental, and implementation/termination--and there are 12 more or less common "elements" or "process patterns" that characterize the periods. Page 25 presents a figure showing the 12 elements, now called "components." Unfortunately, except insofar as there is an indication of time, with "1. Gestation" on the left of the figure and "11. Adoption" and "12. Termination" on the right the figure is unexplained. There are solid lines, dotted lines, boxes, circle nodes and arrows, and two mysterious letters A and B, but no explanation of any of these designations. Building on evidence from three of the case studies, which are presented at the end of the book, the authors spend the remainder of this chapter describing the unfolding of the innovation process, period by period and component by component. Unfortunately, eve n here, the mapping is a little unclear; the components labeled "3. Plans" and "10. Infrastructure Development" in the figure are discussed under headings called "Resources and Exposure" and "Industry Team Playing" in the prose. One of the major challenges of this book, for the reader, is the constantly changing terminology.