The Handbook of Technology and Innovation Management

5.2. Discussion

I have articulated three structuring options that managers can use to overcome the unmanageables of innovation and enable the integral, emergent, and empowered activities that are necessary for sustained product innovation. My basic argument is that these unmanageables are not inherent or inevitable, but rather are produced by the inappropriate structuring of everyday work. If everyday social action in the work organization is focused on separate parts, on processes that have been abstracted from the whole and thus have little intrinsic meaning, and are motivated by coercive authority, then segmentation, rigidity, and lack of power arise straightforwardly. These unmanageables are the rational outcomes of such a social system. But if structures frame core processes of innovation work in the three complementary ways outlined here, then integrated, emergent, and energized social action arises straightforwardly. These structures are:

• defining the nature of the work people do and with whom, based on four distinct kinds of innovation problems to be set and solved;

• structuring how that work is to be carried out based on work as reflective practice, where everyone takes responsibility for the whole project and actively integrates designing with using;

• controlling work by giving people direct access to three everyday resources: time and attention, control over the application of their own expertise, and control over specific choices made to solve problems.

The three structures ...