Article summary with Towards a Multidisciplinary Definition of Innovation by Baregheh, Rowley and Sambrook - 2009

To demonstrate the diversity of the definitions of innovation and to press the case for the development of an integrative definition, the article offers a few examples of definitions of organizational innovation where some emphasize different aspects of innovation and others are dedicated to a discipline. Ultimately some 60 definitions of innovation were collected from the various disciplinary literatures, and analyzed in order to get to one multidisciplinary definition of innovation.

Introduction

Organizations need to innovate in response to changing customer demands and lifestyles and in order to capitalize on opportunities offered by technology and changing marketplaces, structures and dynamics. Organizational innovation can be performed in relation to products, services, operations, processes, and people. There is agreement that in order to both sustain their competitive position and to strengthen it, organizations and economies must innovate and promote innovation. Innovation is a key policy and strategic issue. Innovation is tightly coupled to change, as organizations use innovation as a tool in order to influence an environment or due to their changing environments (internal and external). Different forms of innovation draw to varying extents on different teams, departments, and professional disciplines. Therefore, innovation is of interest to practitioners and researchers across a range of business and management disciplines, and has been discussed variously in, for example, the literature on human resource management, operations management, entrepreneurship, research and development, information technology, engineering and product design, and marketing and strategy. Whilst there is some overlap between the various definitions of innovation, overall the number and diversity of definitions leads to a situation in which there is no clear and authoritative definition of innovation.

Literature review

To demonstrate the diversity of the definitions of innovation and to press the case for the development of an integrative definition, the article offers a few examples of definitions of organizational innovation where some emphasize different aspects of innovation and others are dedicated to a discipline. Ultimately some 60 definitions of innovation were collected from the various disciplinary literatures, and analyzed in order to get to one multidisciplinary definition of innovation.

Results and discussion

Tables II and III show the attributes of innovation definitions that have been identified through the content analysis. These six attributes form the basis for an integrative definition of innovation, since they have been surfaced from key definitions drawn from different disciplinary areas.

These attributes are defined as follows:

• Nature of innovation refers to the form of innovation as in something new or improved
• Type of innovation refers to the kind of innovation as in the type of output or the result of innovation, e.g. product or service
• Stages of innovation refers to all the steps taken during an innovation process which usually start from idea generation and end with commercialization
• Social context refers to any social entity, system or group of people involved in the innovation process or environmental factors affecting it
• Means of innovation refers to the necessary resources (e.g. technical, creative, financial) that need to be in place for innovation
• Aim of innovation is the overall result that the organizations want to achieve through innovation.

On the basis of the key attributes of definitions of innovation and the descriptors used by those definitions to characterize the attributes, a diagrammatic definition of “innovation” is proposed in Figure 1. The diagram incorporates the six attributes identified as being common to the various disciplinary definitions of innovation.

Definition >> Innovation = The multi-stage process whereby organizations transform ideas into new/improved products, service or processes, in order to advance, compete and differentiate themselves successfully in their marketplace

The definition begins with the term “multi stage process” as most of the definitions presented earlier have highlighted that innovation is not a discrete act and is a process.

Secondly, the article focuses on business organizations in this paper, although it has not explicitly articulated in the textual definition that innovation can occur in various social entities and contexts.

Third, as shown in the diagram, many definitions have focused on the means of innovation, that is the ways in which ideas have been transformed into new, improved and changed entities, whether products or services, for example, for new markets.