Innovation Theory and the (Re‐)foundation of Management: Facing the Unknown

• Date: 01 June 2019
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/emre.12308
• Published date: 01 June 2019

Innovation Theory and the (Re-)foundation of

Management: Facing the Unknown

MARIA ELMQUIST,

1

ANNABELLE GAWER

2

and PASCAL LEMASSON

3

Setting the stage for this special issue

Within the management research community, the last few

years haverevealed a growing desire tofocus explicitly on

new discoveries and to challenge the very foundations of

our discipline. This special issue addresses how

innovation-management theories might enrich

managementscience, helping to discover new phenomena

and formulate research hypotheses with relevance for the

entire discipline.

Contemporary managers face many challenges when

shaping new industrial ecosystems, engaging with

disruptive technologies, inventing new business models,

or even re-inventing their own organizations. An

interestingrecurring theme in all thesecontexts is that they

involve not just uncertainty, but facing the unknown.

While uncertainty refers to events that are known, and

whose probability of occurrence can be estimated (as

inherited from statistical decision theory), the unknown

denotes events that can be expressed conceptually, but

can hardly be imagined, and therefore cannot be

described. For example, tomorrow’s weather is uncertain,

but forms of extraterrestrial life are unknown. While

uncertainty can be reduced (e.g., by statistical sampling),

the unknown must be explored through an effort of

imagination.

In innovationmanagement, the way innovatorsrelate to

the future is closer to exploring the unknown. They don’t

regard the future as ‘uncertain,’but as a matter that has to

be shaped, transformed, named, and generally invented in

a proactive way. This perspective could also be useful to

general management.

Some innovation management concepts have already

enriched mainstream management literature.

‘Organizational ambidexterity’(Duncan, 1976; Tushman

and O’Reilly III, 1996; Gibson and Birkinshaw, 2004;

Tushman et al., 2010), which was initially proposed as a

way of organizing for innovation, has more recently been

acknowledged as a fundamental notion in organization

studies (Birkinshaw and Gupta, 2013). The concept of

‘absorptive capacity’has enjoyed a similar crossover.

But despite these individual examples, innovation

management has largely remained a ‘specialization,’as

illustrated by journal rankings in many countries,

preventing it from taking root in management science.

The purpose of this special issue is to bring insights from

innovation management to the very heart our discipline.

We now summarize the six papers included, before

discussing how they contribute to (re-)visiting and (re-)

founding management science with innovation theory.

These six contribu tions link innovat ion management and

management foundations.

In ‘Understanding the invention phase of management

innovation: a design theory perspective,’Albert David

examines the invention process of a single famous

management innovation: Drucker’s‘management by

objectives’(MBO) concept.

In ‘A century oldand still visionary: Fayol’sinnovative

theory of management,’Armand Hatchuel and Blanche

Segrestin revisit Fayol’s legacy and argue that, contra ry

to previous analysis, Fayol positioned innovation at the

very core of management science.

In ‘Contracting for the unknown and the logic of

innovation,’Anna Grandori and Marco Furlotti identify

specific types of contracts for managing innovation,

which they term ‘constitutional contracts.’

In ‘The design logicof new business models: unveiling

cognitive foundations of managerial reasoning,’Dirk

Schneckenberg and Vivek Velamuri uncover the

cognitive processes used in creating innovative business

models.

In ‘Experimenting in the unknown: Lessons from the

Manhattan Project,’Sylvain Lenfle and Thomas Gillier

show that Thomke’s model of experimentation was

actually built for experimentation in uncertainty, and

extend it to the unknown.

Finally, in ‘Designing decisions in the unknown:

towards a generative decision model for management

science,’Pascal Le Masson, Armand Hatchuel, Mario

Le Glatin, and Benoit Weiladdress the issue of designing

decisions in the unknown.

Note: This is a co-authored editorial; authors appear in

alphabetical order.

European Management Review, Vol. 16, 379–381, (2019)

DOI: 10.1111/emre.12308

©2019 European Academy of Management