Organizing for modern technology and innovation: A review and synthesis

Successful industrial innovation: critical factors for the 1990s

“…This means that managing innovation remains a highly exacting task requiring managers of high quality and ability for its success. Furthermore not only does SIN require managerial flexibility, but organisational flexibility also, and companies will need to design adaptable, 'innovation friendly' organisational structures if they are successfully to shift towards the fifth generation innovation process (Souder, 1991). Finally, the evolving systems integration and networking nature of innovation, including as it does a variety of internal and external collaborators, means that the requirement for innovation/technology strategy to be at the leading edge of corporate strategy is greater than ever before.…”

The Strategic Management of Technological Innovations: A Review and a Model

“…Conceptual knowledge is used cognitively to design non-existent products and processes. The extent and sophistication of conceptual knowledge needed for technological innovation may depend on the following factors (Shrivastava and Souder, 1984;Souder, 1986;Souder and Shrivastava, 1985;Souder et al, 1977): the amount of training or education required to conduct scientific investigation on the project; the amount of empiricism (trial and error) versus theory employed in the investigation; the level of empirical validation of the theory; the degree to which desired outcomes can be specified.…”

Interpreting the Challenger disaster: communication under conditions of risk and liability

“…Structuration theory which is directed toward &dquo;explaining how organizational structures change over time,&dquo; (Ranson et al, 1980, p. 1 ) is helpful in showing that the structure of NASA changed suddenly on January 28, 1986, at 46,000 feet in the air, from an entrepreneurial-technological culture to a legalistic-bureaucratic one. In a less dramatic form than the risk-taking soldier who is either court-martialed or honored depending on the outcome, NASA switched from being an ambitious, risk-taking organization, a quality considered a requirement for technological development (Souder, 1983), to being a conservative bureaucracy where proof of what one did not know, decisions one did not make, and meetings one did not attend were sources of relief from negative sanctions. For NASA decision makers, the organization switched from a culture of risk directed towards involvement in economically measurable results to a process culture where proof of the way decisions had been made took precedence over performance (Deal and Kennedy, 1982).…”