Making innovation everyone´s business Using routines and controls

Sammanfattning: Contemporary high-technology companies are under pressure to deliver short-term profits and to serve the market demands for future innovative solutions. An increased interest for alternative innovations such as new services or business models to be recognized in parallel to new technologies results in that companies are increasingly attempting to engage all their employees in innovation. This requires attention to what ways of working need to be changed in order to better support employees in pursuing both induced and autonomous initiatives i.e. to realize ideas that are aligned to and those that deviate from a company´s existing strategy and operational models. A key challenge is related to understanding how to develop organizational routines; how to make use of management controls to support both types of initiatives despite their different needs and, make the changes in routines and controls become accepted throughout the organization. Surprisingly few studies deal with understanding how managers or assigned employees in companies go about to address these issues.The overall purpose of this thesis is to increase knowledge on how innovation capabilities are built when involving a broad base of employees in innovation in large and mature organizations. More specifically, this thesis seeks to understand what characterizes organizational routines and what are the consequences from using different types of management controls supporting employees in pursuing both induced and autonomous initiatives. The thesis is made up of four qualitative studies that explore how a planned effort to deliberately involve a broad base of employees in innovation is performed and experienced by actors representing different hierarchical levels and functions in two large and world-leading high-technology companies.The research shows how involving employees in innovation can be made possible through a conscious and creative design and usage of routines and controls. The thesis shows that an upper management call for an increased number of induced and autonomous initiatives results in the use of diverse approaches to achieve this goal even within the same organization due to personal beliefs and experiences of what innovation needs and due to a bias towards either personnel or action management controls. Further, a strong focus on developing organizational routines to initiate innovation was observed at the expense of routines for selection and development of new initiatives. The studies show also that the outcome is dominated by incremental process improvements and the underlying reason to this result is discussed in this thesis.Four characteristics were identified that distinguish organizational routines used in settings successfully supporting employees in pursuing both induced and autonomous initiatives : i) routines targeting selection, development and retention in an innovation process, ii) routines were frequently used and were somewhat linked to other routines, iii) routines to support resource owners and/or customers to come in direct contact with innovators to evaluate and develop new ideas in an atmosphere characterized by a mix of playfulness and seriousness were developed and finally iv) a combination of personnel and actions controls were used. Implications for innovation management, organizational routine and management control research are discussed.Finally, a re-thinking and re-design of the performance management is suggested, taking into consideration the potential in using measurement and goal setting to provide effective means to support both induced and autonomous initiatives. The studies showed that the use of performance measurement can act as a trigger for managers to take actions. In addition, the thesis identified the value in improving the understanding of how result controls, specifically goals, can be formulated and used to stimulate different types of innovative behaviors.