I'm just back from an organized discussion that addressed innovation in long-term capital goods projects and it's really intriguing how one particular type of generalization has managed to prevail in the modern research on the subject. Let me paraphrase some of the ideas that were floating around.
Do clients hinder innovation? Well, the question is more or less meaningless. An analogy would be investigating the structure of a hydrogen atom by viewing a distant star with a telescope. You can try but it is utterly meaningless. You need to use a microscope or some other similar device and study the atom up close and not some distant stars despite the fact that they might be constituted by these atoms. So, coming back to innovation, one needs to study innovation where it happens and it happens in closely knit teams - in heads of individuals and not on some abstract organizational levels. Organizations are entities that exist in a communicative space constituted by individual participating people through their own communicative domains. Therefore, organizations cannot innovate, think and so on. Individuals think, create and suggest ideas, other individuals object, accept or reject these ideas and so on. Now, whether this happens in communities of practice (i.e. closely knit teams) or within a particular hierarchy we are still talking about individuals operating in some specific circumstances. So in this sense talking about NHS as a client organization has no bearing with what innovation represents in reality, a product of individual thinking. Yes, you are not alone in the process, you need other people to work with you if you want your ingenious idea to become an innovation one day. However, it is not an organisation that is doing the thinking along the way but people involved in the process. Would thus building a hospital for NHS Scotland be the same as building it for NHS England or Northern Ireland for that matter? Of course not because we would be exposed to completely different circumstances, surrounded by completely different people and the only commonality we can talk about in this case is situation- or circumstances-centred study of innovation. There is no single personified entity of NHS that hinders or supports innovation. There are people or teams within its structure that are more or less prone to changes, and there are procedural obstacles (e.g. red tape). You may be lucky enough to be able to work with the right type of people though red tape by itself may filter out some of the more radical innovations. Furthermore, all that implies innovation studies need to be centred around a specific team and valid questions to me then are:
- How a team of individuals each with specific characteristics generate innovations in a specific team setting?
- What happens if we change the setting?
- What happens if we replace one individual from the team with another person that has opposing characteristics?
- What if we enlarge/reduce such a team?
- What are the procedural obstacles that may prevent the team to turn ideas into innovations?
To summarize there are two types of generalization out there. On one hand you can look at a client organization like NHS for instance and ask yourself how they impact innovation on their capital goods projects. In this case you will constantly run into trouble because in one project they may hinder innovation yet in another they don't. The reason being that different people will be responsible for different projects. The other option is to generalize by means of studying functional primitive of the innovation process and that is an individual or a team of individuals followed by investigating the impact of individual characteristics (i.e. individual differences) and structural characteristics (i.e. team structure and setting). The most important outcome of this second generalization si replicability or genuine generalization leading to findings that can be applied in any organization, be it client, contractor or any other industry that is. I don't know about you but I prefer the second option as it has far greater chances of producing something that can help improve our udnerstanding of innovation and innovation processes themselves.
