Looking Forward and Looking Backward: Cognitive and Experiential Search

Gavetti, Giovanni; Levinthal, Daniel A.

doi:10.2307/2666981

Cited by 1,589 publications

(1,254 citation statements)

References 28 publications

(27 reference statements)

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“…The innovation literature indicates at least six main types of barriers that are commonly found: organizational, cultural, economic and financial, market, regulatory and path-dependence. (7,(22)(23)(24)(25)(26)(27)(28)(29)(30)(31)) From a policy perspective, this indicates that policies to 19 support innovation generally, through the reduction of these barriers, are expected to have a positive impact on green chemistry.…”

Section: B Analysis: Barriers To Innovation Vs Barriers To Green Chmentioning

confidence: 99%

Barriers to the Implementation of Green Chemistry in the United States

Matus

Clark

Anastas

et al. 2012

Environ. Sci. Technol.

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Abstract:This paper investigates the conditions under which firms are able to develop and implement innovations with sustainable development benefits. In particular, we examine "green chemistry" innovations in the United States. Via interviews with green chemistry leaders from industry, academia, NGOs and government, we identified six major categories of challenges commonly confronted by innovators. They are: (1) economic and financial, (2) regulatory, (3) technical, (4) organizational, (5) cultural and (6) 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 2 two elements of these that are particular to the implementation of green chemistry innovations are the absence of clear definitions and metrics for use by researchers and decision makers, as well as the interdisciplinary demands of these innovations on researchers and management. Finally, we conclude with some of the strategies that have been successful thus far in overcoming these barriers, and the types of policies which could have positive impacts moving forward.

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Section: B Analysis: Barriers To Innovation Vs Barriers To Green Chmentioning

confidence: 99%

Barriers to the Implementation of Green Chemistry in the United States

Matus

Clark

Anastas

et al. 2012

Environ. Sci. Technol.

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“…The more these are reproduced over time, the more likely they are to become competency traps (Levinthal and March 1993) when the environment changes. As such, managers must, at certain points, shift emphasis from the past to the future in order to assure organizational survival (Gavetti and Levinthal 2000). Thus, it is the very process of projecting the future that renders the past a greater or lesser source of competitive advantage.…”

Section: Implications For Understanding Organizational Continuity Andmentioning

confidence: 99%

Temporal Work in Strategy Making

Kaplan

Orlikowski

2013

Organization Science

437

458

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This paper reports on a field study of strategy making in one organization facing an industry crisis. In a comparison of five strategy projects, we observed that organizational participants struggled with competing interpretations of what might emerge in the future, what was currently at stake, and even what had happened in the past. We develop a model of temporal work in strategy making that articulates how actors resolved differences and linked their interpretations of the past, present, and future so as to construct a strategic account that enabled concrete strategic choice and action. We found that settling on a particular account required it to be coherent, plausible and acceptable, otherwise breakdowns resulted. Such breakdowns could impede progress, but could also be generative in provoking a search for new interpretations and possibilities for action. The more intensely actors engaged in temporal work, the more likely the strategies departed from the status quo. Our model suggests that strategy cannot be understood as the product of more or less accurate forecasting without considering the multiple interpretations of present concerns and historical trajectories that help to constitute those forecasts. Projections of the future are always entangled with views of the past and present, and temporal work is the means by which actors construct and reconstruct the connections among them. These insights into the mechanisms of strategy making help explain the practices and conditions that produce organizational inertia and change. Temporal Work in Strategy Making-1 -A fundamental challenge for managers making strategy is coping with an uncertain future. In studying strategic change, scholars have emphasized the importance of sensemaking as a collective and often conflictual interpretive process for dealing with uncertainties about the business, the market, and the environment that lead to breakdowns in understandings and require cognitive reorientations to move forward (Balogun and Johnson 2004;Gioia and Chittipeddi 1991;Gioia et al. 1994;Kaplan 2008b;Maitlis and Sonenshein 2010;Rouleau 2005). These studies suggest that linking across interpretations of the past, present and future make action possible, but have left unexplained how and why some linkages work and some fail in practice, and, for those that do work, why some lead to the status quo and others produce change.Our study of strategy making in practice offers some answers to these questions. We found that managers -through a set of practices that we call "temporal work" -come to settle on particular strategic accounts that link interpretations of the past, present and future in ways that appear coherent, plausible and Settling on a strategic account, even if provisional, allows actors to shift from disagreeing or deliberating about meanings to implementing strategic choices, thus enabling the organization to move forward in the face of uncertainty. If a settlement breaks down, further temporal work is required in order to reconstruct a new str...

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“…While a bulk of the problems firms face may be solved through a combination of internal experienced-based local (March 1991), cognitive (Gavetti and Levinthal 2000) and analogical (Gavetti et al 2005) search processes, there may still remain some problems that for a variety of reasons (lack of appropriate knowledge, lack of capacity, need for novel ideas) cannot be solved internally and need to be sent outside.…”

Section: Section 1 Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Marginality and Problem-Solving Effectiveness in Broadcast Search

Jeppesen

Lakhani²

2010

Organization Science

964

754

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We examine who the winners are in science problem solving contests characterized by open broadcast of problem information, self-selection of external solvers to discrete problems from the laboratories of large R&D intensive companies and blind review of solution submissions. Analyzing a unique dataset of 166 science challenges involving over 12,000 scientists revealed that technical and social marginality, being a source of different perspectives and heuristics, plays an important role in explaining individual success in problem solving. The provision of a winning solution was positively related to increasing distance between the solver's field of technical expertise and the focal field of the problem. Female solvers -known to be in the "outer circle" of the scientific establishment -performed significantly better than men in developing successful solutions. Our findings contribute to the emerging literature on open and distributed innovation by demonstrating the value of openness, at least narrowly defined by disclosing problems, in removing barriers to entry to non-obvious individuals. We also contribute to the knowledge-based theory of the firm by showing the effectiveness of a market-mechanism to draw out knowledge from diverse external sources to solve internal problems

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Looking Forward and Looking Backward: Cognitive and Experiential Search

Cited by 1,589 publications

References 28 publications

Barriers to the Implementation of Green Chemistry in the United States

Barriers to the Implementation of Green Chemistry in the United States

Temporal Work in Strategy Making

Marginality and Problem-Solving Effectiveness in Broadcast Search

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