March 16, 2024

Management Introduction to Design Thinking Case Study

MGMT 2902: Innovation – An Introduction to Design Thinking MIDTERM Released: Due: October 11 @ Noon Atlantic Time October 17 @ 11:59PM Atlantic Time Midterm Overview This document includes all of the questions that are part of our first midterm in MGMT 2902. YOU ARE TO USE THIS DOCUMENT TO COMPLETE THE MIDTERM. Please write your answers in the box below each of the questions. In addition to this document, you also need access to the midterm case study. There is a link to the reading on Brightspace. The link will take you to the location of the case study within the Dal Libraries. This midterm covers content covered in Modules #1-5. Provided you have completed all course readings and learning activities prior to the release of the midterm, I would expect that the midterm would take 8-10 hours to complete. THIS IS AN ‘OPEN-BOOK’ MIDTERM. IT WILL BE NECESSARY FOR STUDENTS TO CONSULT COURSE VIDEOS AND READINGS; HOWEVER, MIDTERMS ARE TO BE COMPLETED INDIVIDUALLY – WITHOUT ANY COLLABORATION OR ASSISTANCE. Note about sources / citations: You will likely need to include ideas, arguments or quotes from course readings or videos. Be sure to cite them correctly using APA 6th or 7th edition. If you use a direct quote, please be sure provide a page or paragraph #. Failure to properly cite is a form of plagiarism. If you’re not familiar with APA, you can access quick reference guides on the Dal Libraries website: https://libraries.dal.ca/help/style-guides.html. You can include a single Bibliography at the end of the midterm, but I would suggest that it is easier for you to treat each answer as a mini-essay – include a short “Works Cited” or “Bibliography” at the end of each of your answers. The one exception to the need to cite pertains to the case study. When you’re answering questions about the case study its fine to reference general ideas from the case study without citing. If you use direct language from the case study please be sure to quote and cite properly. Guidance The questions I ask in the midterm are not intended to trick you. I am looking to ascertain how well you understand the course material. As such, few of the questions are asking you to simply recite something from a reading. The questions are designed to see if you understand the material, not if you can recall the material. I am offering you some guidance, below, on how to approach the midterm – please read it closely: • • • • Be sure that you have included your name and banner number in the footer of the assignment. Read each question very closely. You have a whole week to complete, at most, an 8 to 10-hour midterm. Do not rush things. Most of the questions have more than one question contained within. Make sure you answer all the questions I’ve asked. Review the grading rubric that is on the second page of this midterm. The rubric reveals a lot of about the level of detail / depth of thinking that I’m looking for. Midterm answers are different than answers to the questions in our weekly quizzes. I cannot imagine that any of the questions in this midterm can be answered in a few sentences. Midterm questions are Student Name: MGMT 2902 MIDTERM (Fall 2023) – Page 1 Banner #: • • • • more complex and require more substance in your answers (see suggestions for how you might achieve that below). I would think that most of the questions will need 1 to 1.5 pages (using 1.5 spacing, 10-11 font and the existing margins) to answer. Do not make assumptions of the reader (that would be me!). I am well-versed in the course material, but I want you to answer these questions as if you need to provide the reader with all information necessary to support your answer. You need to reveal your thought process. It is not enough to simply state your opinion or answer yes/no. You need to elaborate and explain why you are taking a certain position. The greater your depth of thinking and the more you connect your ideas and positions to course material the stronger the answer. Please be careful of using absolutes. If there has been a common theme in the first part of our class, it’s that there are a lot of differing opinions out in the world. If you provide an answer using words like ‘everyone’, ‘always’ and ‘never’ then your answer is already problematic because without concrete evidence you cannot make broad, sweeping statements. This style of midterm is not the same as writing a midterm in a crunched two-hour window. I am giving you time – your answers should reflect this. Give your answers introductions and conclusions, make sure your thoughts and arguments are well-organized and clear and write in complete sentences (there may be a place for bullet-points, but they should be used sparingly). Be sure to proof-read the midterm before you submit. To support students, I will be available online at the following times to answer any questions you have about the midterm. These are optional drop-in sessions: • 11:00am – 11:30am Atlantic Time on Friday, October 13 • 9:00am – 9:30am Atlantic Time on Sunday, October 15 Look for a link to the meeting in Microsoft Teams – it will be in the team called “MGMT 2902 (Innovation): FULL CLASS (Fall 2023)”. You are a member of this team – I added all of you at the beginning of the term. Evaluation Each question will be graded out of 5 points. I will use the following grade descriptors to guide my grading of your midterm: 5 4.5 4 3.5 3 2.5 A perfect grade for an answer is issued in the case of very high achievement and distinction. The answer is error free; no questions or suggestions for improvement emerge for the grader. Work is deemed exceptional in content, clarity of thinking and writing mechanics. The answer demonstrates an outstanding ability to grasp concepts from course materials and apply this understanding to the question. The answer is insightful – the ideas presented are well supported. A small number of very minor questions or suggestions for improvement emerge for the grader. Quality of writing is excellent. The answer demonstrates a very good ability to grasp concepts from the course materials and apply this understanding to the question. The answer is strong overall – some minor questions or suggestions for improvement emerge for the grader but no critical weaknesses are identified. Writing errors are minimal. The answer demonstrates a good ability to grasp concepts from the course materials and apply this understanding to the question. Many minor questions or suggestions for improvement emerge. One aspect of the answer requires significant improvement. The answer demonstrates a partial ability to grasp concepts from course materials and apply this understanding to the question. The answer is satisfactory – all questions are attempted; however, some significant questions or suggestions for improvement emerge for the grader. Writing errors are notable but do not take away from the reader’s understanding. The answer demonstrates a limited ability to grasp concepts from course materials and apply this understanding to the question. The answer is weak overall – critical questions or suggestions for improvement emerge for the grader (this may include one part of the question not being answered). Writing errors are significant and disrupt the reader’s understanding. Student Name: MGMT 2902 MIDTERM (Fall 2023) – Page 2 Banner #: 1.5 0 Submission An answer is provided but is incomplete, incoherent and/or unsupported throughout. Writing errors make the answer largely unreadable. No answer is provided. The midterm is due at 11:59PM Atlantic Time on Tuesday, October 17. Midterms submitted after the deadline will not be accepted. An extension to the midterm submission deadline would be approved only as a result of extraordinary and well-documented circumstances. In such cases a late penalty of 10% / day would be applied. Please upload your midterm to the Brightspace assignment folder called Midterm. The document should be uploaded to as a Microsoft Word document to facilitate the return of feedback. If you submit a document that I can’t open (i.e. a Pages document) it will be as though you didn’t submit a midterm at all. Student Name: MGMT 2902 MIDTERM (Fall 2023) – Page 3 Banner #: MIDTERM QUESTIONS – PLEASE WRITE YOUR ANSWERS IN THE ‘ANSWER BOX’ PROVIDED AFTER EACH QUESTION. The MGMT 2902 midterm involves examining many of our course concepts in the context of a short case study. The case study is called Preserving Social Purpose Amid a Global Pandemic. It was written by Gregory C. Unruh & Fernanda Arreola in 2022 and is published in the Stanford Social Innovation Review. Here is the citation for the case study: • Unruh, G. C., & Arreola, F. (2022). Preserving Social Purpose Amid a Global Pandemic. Stanford Social Innovation Review, 20(3), 18–24. You can find a permalink to the case study in Brightspace (in the Midterm folder). The link will allow you to find an online copy of the article within the Dal Libraries. Completing the midterm is essentially a two-part exercise: 1. Find the case study and set aside some time to read it. It is not a long case study, but you really want to be sure you understand it. Depending on your reading speed, I would allocate about 30-45 minutes to read it. 2. Answer the questions below. Some of the questions ask you to demonstrate your understanding of the article. Other questions ask you to consider the case study through the lens of ideas and concepts that we have explored in other readings and learning videos that have been part of the first half of our course. QUESTION #1: i. ii. Define the social problem that Alejandro Souza set out to solve. Define the problem with as much detail and precision as possible. Consider the characteristics of wicked problems (presented in the Module 5 video: A Closer look at Social Innovation). Discuss how the problem you identified above can be considered a wicked problem. HINT: Your discussion should explore how the ‘problem’ fulfills at least four of the characteristics of wicked problems. A rich discussion should provide a description of each characteristic and then show how it is present in the case study by linking to concrete examples. Answer (the box will expand as you type your answer): Student Name: MGMT 2902 MIDTERM (Fall 2023) – Page 4 Banner #: QUESTION #2: In Module #3 we devoted time to understanding innovation within organizations. i. ii. iii. Define the concept: “culture of innovation”. In our Week #3 required reading (The Hard Truth About Innovative Cultures), author Gary Pisano makes reference to five “paradoxes”. Briefly describe each paradox. Consider the case study, what evidence is there that Pixza has experienced and/or figured out (solved) one of Pisano’s paradoxes. Hint: support your discussion by linking examples from the case study back to points you made in the sub-questions above (i and ii). Answer (the box will expand as you type your answer): QUESTION #3: Thinking back to our reading Rediscovering Social Innovation (Module 5): i. ii. iii. How do the authors of the article Rediscovering Social Innovation define social innovation? In what ways does Pixza fulfill the definition of being a social innovation? Think back to Module 2 and our exploration of different kinds of innovation. Identify two other kinds of innovation that are exemplified in Pixza? For example, would you consider Pixza to be an example of process innovation, business model innovation, radical innovation, product innovation, inclusive innovation (you can reference any of the kinds of innovation discussed in our modules). Remember to support your assessment. Answer (the box will expand as you type your answer): Student Name: MGMT 2902 MIDTERM (Fall 2023) – Page 5 Banner #: QUESTION #4: A persistent challenge with social innovation is finding a way to financially sustain innovative solutions while still placing the pursuit of social value or social impact good as the primary aim of the undertaking. i. ii. iii. Define the concept: social value (hint: see Module #5) The global pandemic put great financial pressures on Pixza. Discuss three ways in which the problem of financial viability ($$) was creatively addressed in this case study? Your discussion might include – what was tried, what impact did it have and why do you think it worked? Do you think the Pixza is successful in placing priority on social impact over financial gain? Be sure to support your assessment with evidence provided in the case study. Answer (the box will expand as you type your answer): QUESTION #5: In Module 4 we look at the relationship between innovation and diversity. In the reading “Closing Diversity Gaps” the article discusses three demographic or groups of people who are not as involved in the practice of innovation as they could and should be. The authors talk about these exclusions as ‘gaps’. i. ii. iii. Identify and describe the three gaps presented by the article. The Pixza case study highlights efforts to address include previously excluded people / groups in an innovation project. Which of the three ‘gaps’ is being addressed in the case study? The Closing Diversity Gaps article concludes with recommendations for closing these critical gaps. What evidence is there that some of these recommendations are occurring within the Pixza case study? A strong answer would identify touch on four of the recommendations and link to evidence from the case study. Answer (the box will expand as you type your answer): ****THE END**** Student Name: MGMT 2902 MIDTERM (Fall 2023) – Page 6 Banner #: 18 Stanford Social Innovation Review / Summer 2022 AN INSIDE LOOK AT ONE ORGANIZATION Preserving Social Purpose Amid a Global Pandemic By Gregory C. Unruh & Fernanda Arreola Mexico’s Pixza began as a social inclusion vehicle for homeless adults through a pizza business. Its evolution demonstrates how social entrepreneurs can leverage purpose to sustain organizations through a crisis and to reengineer business models to foster greater impact. n 2015, Alejandro Souza launched the Mexican social enterprise Pixza with a dual purpose. It was a hip, socially responsible pizzeria that oﬀered gourmet slices with uniquely Mexican ingredients that became the talk of the town in Mexico City. But it was also a social reinsertion organization for the homeless youth of the city, who worked at the pizzeria while receiving services and learning valuable skills. Souza weathered many challenges to create and grow Pixza. “An entrepreneurial roller coaster” is how he describes the experience. What sustained his effort was a commitment to Mexico City’s marginalized young men, something that had become the core of Pixza’s brand. “People loved coming to Pixza,” Souza says. “It was a place where you could interact with our Agents of Change, which is what we call our employees. They would tell you about their lives, and you would live this empowerment story. It was a special place.” As 2018 began, Pixza was on track to double its social impact thanks to new investment funding secured to expand operations. Then in March 2020 the COVID-19 pandemic came to Mexico, and business collapsed. “Our sales went down 90 to 98 percent,” Souza says. “We basically weren’t selling.” As the city locked down, most restaurants in Mexico launched massive layoﬀs to stabilize their businesses. Souza, however, knew they could not abandon their Agents of Change: “Pixza is always mission ﬁrst, mission-focused, mission-driven.” But could Pixza’s commitments be sustained during a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic? Over the ensuing months, Pixza’s leadership pivoted repeatedly to preserve the organization’s commitment to Mexico’s socially abandoned young men. Through sustained social innovation, Pixza evolved its business model not only to maintain its commitments, but also to scale them up for a postpandemic future. Its story highlights the power of purpose to fortify a social enterprise through even the most challenging crises. An Idea at the Bar “I’ve always been a social entrepreneur,” the 35-year-old Souza says. “It’s always been a passion of mine to seek out models that sustainably drive change.” Born to a middle-class family in Mexico City, Souza moved to the United States when he was two and returned to Mexico when he was nine, around the time his entrepreneurial father launched Mexitlán, an educational theme park in Tijuana devoted to Mexican culture and history. This background gave him an interest in entrepreneurship and the empowerment it can provide. The Oxford English Dictionary deﬁnes “empowerment” as “the process of becoming stronger and more conﬁdent, especially in controlling one’s life and claiming one’s rights.” Souza sees social entrepreneurship as more attractive than more traditional charitable aid or philanthropy because it empowers rather than creating dependency. “Imagine you see someone who needs a shirt and you give them your own,” Souza says. “You feel good and the person that receives Stanford Social Innovation Review / Summer 2022 n Pixza’s Agents of the shirt feels good. Imagine that you then receive a shirt from someone else. And so on. The problem is that, in the end, there is someone that does not have a shirt. So you actually feel good, but you have not solved the problem.” In 2005, Souza undertook undergraduate studies at Babson College, a private university in Wellesley, Massachusetts, that focuses on entrepreneurship. Souza became one of Babson’s pioneering students in coupling business with social purpose. After graduating in 2009, Souza participated in a series of social enterprise development projects around the globe, including Rwanda, Uganda, Bhutan, and Brazil. The projects enabled Souza to witness PHOTO COURTESY OF PIXZA Change, such as Ángel photographed above, are formerly homeless youth who work in the business. international development on the ground and interact with national development ministries as well as multilateral agencies such as the World Bank, the United Nations, and the Inter-American Development Bank. These international and cross-sectoral experiences led Souza back to school, pursuing a master’s degree in international and public affairs at Columbia University in New York City. An assignment in one of his graduate classes turned out to be formative. The professor asked students to ﬁnd someone in the city who had an amazing story, follow that person, and tell his or her story. That is how Souza met “Joe,” a homeless man who, in his 50s, had spent most of his life on the streets. Souza shadowed Joe for four months, learning firsthand about the homelessness crisis in New York City and in the United States at large. Souza became motivated to support homeless adults through social enterprise, a desire that would eventually be realized in his future pizzeria. A round the same time, Souza had a chance meeting with a Mexican friend at a New York City bar. Their conversation predictably turned to a perennial topic of Mexicans living abroad: Mexican food. Souza loved New York’s pizzerias, with their giant slices, and began wondering out loud to his friend why there were no Mexican pizzas. The idea of a pizza restaurant that served up Mexican pies made with traditional ﬂavors and ingredients took hold. With his recent time with Joe and his commitment to empowerment constantly on his mind at the time, his thoughts turned to marrying his pizzeria idea with his desire to help the homeless. By the end of the conversation, an idea crystallized, Souza recalls. “I will start my pizza place, and I am going to exclusively hire homeless adults,” he told his friend. In 2015, after ﬁnishing his studies, Souza returned home to Mexico City. He had been thinking through his idea and was ready to get serious. He gathered his savings and launched his social empowerment restaurant. He decided to call it Pixza, a humorous take on the way that many Mexicans pronounce “pizza” (“pic-sa”). His business 19 Stanford Social Innovation Review / Summer 2022 model would integrate a proﬁt-generating enterprise with a social support program aimed at providing social reintegration opportunities for Mexico City’s homeless populations. GREGORY C. UNRUH is Arison Professor of Values Leadership at George Mason University and is the academic director of the Chief Sustainability Officer executive education program. He also serves as the sustainability guest editor for the MIT Sloan Management Review. FERNANDA ARREOLA is dean of Faculty & Research at ISC Paris. She is also a professor of strategy, innovation, and entrepreneurship, and researches service innovation, governance, and social entrepreneurship. A Social Project Within a Pizzeria From the get-go, Pixza intended to generate positive social and environmental impact through both its products and processes. On the product side, Pixza sold innovative pies made from locally grown, organic, and traditionally Mexican ingredients. The crusts were made with blue corn, a culturally important grain indigenous to Mexico. Diﬀerent pies incorporated such items as grasshoppers, tamales, chile poblano, Jamaica ﬂower, chorizo, Oaxaca cheese, cochinita pibil, spicy meat, and even mole, a delicate sauce made from a host of spices and ingredients. Because Souza at ﬁrst did not know how to make pizza, let alone whether a blue-corn pizza was possible, he turned to his personal network for help, reaching out his grandmother’s former cook, Chayito, a woman who had lived with his family for many years. At that time, Chayito had left Mexico City, so Souza went to visit her for cooking lessons in Cuautla, a city two hours south from Mexico City by car. After spending an immersive 14 hours in the kitchen with her, Souza felt he understood how to imbue his pizzas with traditional Mexican ingredients and ﬂavors. But the pizzas, no matter how innovative, were merely a vehicle for advancing Pixza’s social purpose as the core mission of the company. Souza had integrated social impact directly into Pixza’s business by exclusively hiring young homeless adults from Mexico City shelters. An estimated 20,000 young people were considered “socially abandoned” in Mexico City, living isolated and often dangerous lives in shelters or on the streets. While public support programs existed, most addressed only partial aspects of the issue, such as health care or temporary shelter. By contrast, Pixza’s comprehensive approach invited young men to join its Route of Change program, which guided participants through a dignifying empowerment process that ultimately led to employment and self-reliance. “The Route of Change is the process that the Agents of Change experience during their time at Pixza,” Natalia Pedroza, a Pixza manager, says. “It starts by learning new habits and the discipline to maintain a stable job. Then working on their professional and personal development to evolve and ﬁnally achieve an independent life. To be able to gradually improve the quality of life and have stability.” Upon completing the 12-month program, participants receive a formal job oﬀer from Pixza and officially become an Agent of Change. Pixza’s ultimate goal, however, is not for Agents of Change to stay on at the business indeﬁnitely. Rather, as Pixza cofounder Raymundo von Bertrab explains, the enterprise seeks to “ensure that people in social abandonment arrive at Pixza and later leave for a better opportunity, achieving sustainable social inclusion.” Pixza used a “buy one, give one” model to recruit new Agents of Change while connecting Pixza’s customers to its mission. Pixza workers would deliver a free slice of pizza to a person on the streets for every ﬁve slices bought by customers in the restaurants. Pixza linked its clients into the empowerment process by inviting the person buying the ﬁfth slice to write a personal message for the eventual recipient. This ﬁrst free slice would be the homeless person’s initial contact with Pixza and oﬀered an important early step of trust and interest in Pixza’s empowerment program. Through a series of steps—including a shower, a fresh shirt, a haircut, a medical checkup, and a life-skills course—Route of Change participants would gradually retake control of their lives. “It is a program developed individually for each person, to help them in diﬀerent areas of their lives according to their stage and needs, covering areas such as work, education, self-esteem, ﬁnances, independent living and so on,” ! Pixza’s founder says project manager Regina Medina Alejandro Souza combined Mora. Upon graduating from the proan idea for gourmet pizza gram, participants received a formal and a social commitment to help the homeless. job oﬀer to work for Pixza as a manager, PHOTO BY MARCUS YAM COURTESY OF PIXZA 20 Stanford Social Innovation Review / Summer 2022 having previously covered entry-level positions such as cashier and server. Pixza was a hit with Mexico City’s foodies. Customers would often line up down the street waiting patiently for a slice of pie. The international restaurant rating site Restaurant Guru ranked Pixza as the eighth-best Mexican restaurant out of 17,149 in Mexico City. And customers were drawn by both pizza and purpose. “Pixza is one of the few restaurants with a cause in Mexico that seeks to work as a platform for social empowerment,” one customer wrote on the site. “In addition to sharing a menu of exquisite pizzas with very Mexican ﬂavors, their establishments have the purpose of being an inclusive movement, employing only people with a proﬁle of social abandonment.” Following up on his successful launch, Souza moved quickly to open a second and then a third location in the Mexico City neighborhoods of Roma Norte and Bolívar. With a full staff of seven managers and three successful operations, Pixza was poised to substantially scale up its impact. However, while Pixza was creating value for many of its stakeholders, a looming crisis threatened the sustainability of its business and mission. PHOTO COURTESY OF PIXZA Sustaining Purpose in the Pandemic Pixza’s business model had cleverly tackled two of the common challenges facing social innovators: sustaining and scaling impact. Pixza did this by incorporating its target beneﬁciaries—homeless youth—directly into the business. As employees, they were an indispensable part of Pixza’s business operations, which guaranteed that impact would be sustained as restaurants succeeded. Furthermore, the impact would scale up as new locations were added, and the chain of restaurants grew. “The model is designed that way because if we make more money, we automatically generate more impact,” Souza says. “To sell another pizza, I have to hire someone else to create those pizzas and as long as we continue to exclusively hire previously homeless young adults, the impact follows the sales. We cannot escape the impact.” The ability to build impact into the business model diﬀerentiates successful social enterprises from more traditional corporations taking on social impact initiatives. For many established corporations, sustainability eﬀorts are created to redress social and environmental costs arising from the company’s core business activities. While business corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives can create social and environmental value, they are not directly integrated into the business, and so impact can be tenuous. In eﬀect, companies through CSR subsidize the creation of social value. If leadership changes, if market conditions deteriorate, or if any number of other business challenges arise, companies tend to cut back on social subsidies because they are outside the business model. “Pixza is a 100 percent social company, not a socially responsible company,” says Luis Alonso Castellanos, head of Verne Ventures and professor of entrepreneurship at the Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey. “This means that its economic sustainability and social impact depend fundamentally on its business model.” The COVID-19 pandemic tested the core of Pixza’s business model. As Mexico City began locking down in March 2020, restaurateurs responded to the dramatic drop in revenues by laying oﬀ n Pixza serves pizza with employees as the easiest way to cut expenses. Pixza faced the same challenges as its hospitality sector peers, but it would violate its social purpose if it chose to shed employees. “We had a burn rate of three months,” Souza says. “So, the ﬁrst and most important decision was that we’re not going to ﬁre absolutely anyone. That’s where the mission comes to play because you can say it all day long, but you’re tested when you’re hit with a pandemic. You need to decide whether or not you’re going to live it.” The pandemic was a health and economic crisis that put Pixza’s Agents of Change, the enterprise’s target stakeholders, at their most vulnerable. This commitment to purpose may have closed off the path that the restaurant industry took to survive, but it powered Pixza’s intense effort to preserve and sustain itself through the crisis. “During the pandemic, what led me to do everything possible for Pixza to survive was the fact of knowing that there were people whose lives practically depended on Pixza,” Pedroza says. “Our Agents of Change were giving it all the desire in the world to get ahead, so we had to put in that same desire for Pixza to survive.” authentic Mexican ingredients such as blue corn meal, Oaxacan cheese, grasshoppers, and marinated pork. Monetizing Purpose to Preserve the Business Pixza’s commitment to its Agents of Change prioritized them as the focal point of the enterprise. However, Pixza’s employees were not the only stakeholders to see value in Pixza’s purpose. Many others were drawn to the business and its mission, including customers and 21 Stanford Social Innovation Review / Summer 2022 investors. Pixza’s leadership sought to tap into these stakeholders for a lifeline that could sustain them through the pandemic. Fostering positive social and environmental impact can create both tangible and intangible types of value. Tangible value, of course, is the easiest to manage, because it can be quantiﬁed and inventoried. Monthly revenues and assets such as restaurant equipment can be tallied. So can the growing number of young men who had moved from the streets to self-suﬃciency. But social impact can also create intangible value, something that tends to be less understood by business leaders. While corporate ﬁnance deﬁnes intangible value as nonphysical assets such as goodwill or brand recognition, where is this value stored? Intangible value primarily resides in the heads of stakeholders. The value exists in the perceptions that people have, both positive and negative, of a company and its products. The ability to mobilize and monetize this intangible value is important to the ongoing success of many businesses. How does this intangible value get turned into tangible business value? In the case of a brand, ! After completing Pixza’s program, Agents of Change, it happens when a customer’s posisuch as Tokio below, are oftive perception of a company and its fered jobs as managers. products leads them to purchases. But there are other ways that enterprises can convert intangible value into tangible value. Pixza, for example, creates tangible benefits for its Agent of Change in the form of training, psychological support, and skills for a successful career beyond Pixza. But Agents of Change also develop an intangible perception about Pixza that goes beyond the tangible beneﬁts they receive. While it can’t be measured directly, some of this intangible value materializes for Pixza in the form of employee loyalty, which can be tangibly seen in employment statistics. “Turnover is signiﬁcantly lower, so that means it’s a lot cheaper to hire the kids, despite them having a much more challenging profile,” Souza says. “And that’s because of what we do. Pixza is an empowering place for our Agents of Change.” One of the biggest expenses in the restaurant and hospitality sector is the cost of recruiting, training, and retaining employees. In Mexico, the average employee restaurant turnover is around 138 percent, which means positions are turning over multiple times each year. By contrast, Pixza’s turnover is only 70 percent, which means employees are twice as likely to stay longer and be more loyal to Pixza. This is impressive for the restaurant sector, and even more so considering the challenges that Pixza’s Agents of Change face. Through their commitment to staying on with the franchise, they reaﬃrmed the value that Pixza purportedly created for them. Souza and his colleagues found other avenues to mobilize intangible value in ways that supported Pixza through the pandemic. An opportunity arose early in the crisis as Souza deliberated with the company managers about what to do. “At the beginning of the pandemic, we had to sit down with our managers,” Souza recalls. “We said, ‘Listen, this is the situation. We’re not asking you to do anything that you don’t want to, but we’re allowing you to help us out if you want to.’ And it was amazing. Many of our managers said, ‘Don’t pay me my salary until you can.’ Many of them cut their compensation by 50 percent, and it was completely voluntary. So that was beautiful.” While managers were forgoing their tangible ﬁnancial compensation, they were continuing to receive the intangible benefit of supporting and contributing to Pixza’s mission when the company needed it most. Manager Edgar Garcia Roble explains the concessions in terms of organizational purpose: “I believe that Pixza was born to show the world that all is not lost with humanity and with our system and that there are thousands of sustainable ways to help each other.” Psychologists refer to this type of intangible value as psychic compensation, which is the positive perception and feelings that people gain from contributing to missions they believe in. The managers’ concessions provided moral support and some ﬁnancial easing, but Pixza needed more help. So, Souza reached out to another stakeholder group that was receiving intangible value from Pixza’s mission: its customers. While they gave the company’s pizzas rave reviews, they also valued Pixza’s social purpose. “Today I had the opportunity to visit Pixza,” one customer on Restaurant Guru wrote. “What admiration for their social project! The delicious food and the Agent of Change who attended us were incredible. What a work ethic and the INCREDIBLE customer attention! I hope to visit more often. Many congratulations and again THANK YOU!” PHOTO COURTESY OF PIXZA 22 Stanford Social Innovation Review / Summer 2022 n For every ﬁve slices pur- To give customers a chance to demonstrate this stated support, Pixza created an online digital platform that enabled people to offer various forms of ﬁnancial assistance. Clients could purchase coupons to sponsor individual Agents of Change or to buy pizzas in advance that could be redeemed when the pandemic subsided. Pixza also created a series of branded products for purchase, such as coﬀee mugs, hats, and T-shirts. “We were the ﬁrst company in Mexico to mobilize people to help in any way that they could,” Souza says. “We put up a digital platform where people that love the brand and mission could support us. Basically, it was a monetization plan, a monetization platform, that gave us three months of life.” One product that exempliﬁed the value of Pixza’s purpose was a book written to tell the behind-the-scenes stories of the company’s Agents of Change as they moved from life on the streets and into their apartments and a stable livelihood. The book was written by the managers of Pixza based on interviews with the Route of Change participants documenting their stories over time. Because their ability to sell pizzas through their restaurants had been foreclosed by the pandemic lockdowns, Pixza further reached out to its customers to develop a pizza distribution system. Pixza began producing individually wrapped frozen pizzas and invited customers to buy them in bulk at wholesale prices and then resell them in their neighborhoods to friends and family. “We mobilized a community of our fans and our supporters, not charity-wise, but to become part of our revenue engine,” Souza says. The distribution of Pixza’s pies expanded to 10 states and 13 diﬀerent cities in Mexico. While the three-month lifeline was a huge improvement, it would not be enough to sustain the company through the restructuring PHOTO COURTESY OF PIXZA chased by customers, Pixza gives a free slice to a person on the streets who might beneﬁt from its program. needed to pandemic-proof the business. So Pixza again sought to leverage the intangible value of its mission and purpose by reaching out to investors. While few investors were looking to risk their funds during the pandemic, especially in the restaurant business, Pixza was not just offering financial returns. As Souza says, they were “selling the mission hard because that’s what we do. That’s also being very honest and saying, ‘You’re going to help us. Your money is not going to help us grow, but you’re going to help us survive.’” The pitch worked. Investors were willing to fund the survival of Pixza and its mission. Two investors, Aldo Andrés Saucedo Gómez and his wife, Arabelia Ivette Barrios Leal, highlighted the importance of Pixza’s social value in their decision: “We can’t really measure our ROI [return on investment] only in economic value. We also take into consideration the social impact, all the people that go through the program and ﬁnish it. We are sure there is a lot of talent on the streets, and we feel the urge to help to provide opportunities for them. We are conﬁdent that Pixza gives them those opportunities.” Pixza’s managers and owners were elated. “Imagine getting two new investors in the thick of the pandemic when you’re basically telling them, ‘We don’t know if we’re going to make it,’” Souza says. Pivots and Purpose By monetizing intangible stakeholder goodwill, Pixza had created a lifeline long enough to allow them to rethink the business model. With the additional time, Pixza made several important pivots. First, they began by shifting away from a location-based business model not only for pandemic resilience, but also for scaling. While impact scaling was built into the original business model, such growth was merely additive: Tack on one more restaurant to the chain, and you add one more staﬀ of Agents of Change. While this was a good model, was it the best way to scale impact? This approached focused on tangible value by investing in new physical locations. But could Pixza ﬁnd a way to scale impact on a multiplicative or even exponential level? One possibility was to franchise the model. Souza did not need to rely solely on Pixza to fund the new tangible locations; he could instead expand impact through Pixza’s intangible know-how—its proprietary “Purpose IP”—by sharing it with others. “We have a lot of interest from people that really want to take Pixza to their cities, and we’re going to help them do that,” Souza says. “We’re going to start franchising the model. It’s a hybrid model where we basically control who goes into the business, but they run it by themselves.” 23 24 Stanford Social Innovation Review / Summer 2022 According to this plan, Pixza would stay involved in identifying and training Agents of Change while the franchisee focused on day-to-day operations. “We have a key hire for that, and they’re basically prepping the company so that we can start signing our ﬁrst franchises by the end of 2022,” Souza says. The other important pivot to ensuring ongoing scaling of impact was entering into retail. “We realized that the only real lines of business that were going to grow were going to be retail,” Souza says. “It’s basically getting our frozen pizzas into the homes of as many people as we can by taking products to big retail partners like Walmart. And we are revamping our operations so that we can sell more pizzas and have to hire more young adults to create those pizzas.” Pixza is also leveraging its mission and social purpose to pursue the retail partnerships needed to expand distribution. In 2021, the enterprise began reaching out to purpose-driven companies such as Ikea, because, as Souza says, “they’re super mission-based and values-focused.” Early agreements were concluded with several Mexican food distributors, including Adama, Hadasa Gourmet, and Mora Market—outlets that had similar business commitments to sustainable and equitable practices. At the time of this writing, all of these projects were in their early stages, but the Pixza team was optimistic about their viability and impact-driven value. These pivots opened new business directions for Pixza that would diversify and scale impact. But, as Souza says, “we realized that we had another product.” The Pixza team began to see that the enterprise’s value lay not only in its restaurant-based business model but also in the accumulated know-how that the company had developed about moving at-risk youth oﬀ the streets and into gainful employment. If this know-how could be repurposed, it could be used to create an entirely new business line based on the Route of Change program. “We saw it wasn’t just only our pizzas, but our empowerment methodology that was the core of the social value Pixza was creating,” Souza says. “It was intellectual property.” Not only would this tack help pandemic-proof Pixza’s social purpose, but it would also be a powerful way to leverage their know-how to scale impact. The initiative aligned with emerging societal trends that were making corporations receptive to Pixza’s model. In response to a wave of anti-discrimination social movements—including Me Too and Black Lives Matter—companies were becoming sensitive to issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion and had begun searching for ways to align their operations with societal expectations. Several companies in the restaurant industry and elsewhere were making public commitments to become inclusive enterprises. However, most did not know how to develop an inclusive culture that could empower marginalized communities and contribute to social change. Fortunately, these were the exact competencies that Pixza had been developing for the last four years. “Pixza had validated that inclusion is good for business and that it works,” Souza says. Pixza developed the idea into an inclusive organization certiﬁcation program that would oﬀer companies the needed know-how to hire, train, and support Agents of Change in the way that Pixza had demonstrated was eﬀective. The certiﬁcation would provide access to Pixza’s tools for supporting multidimensional employee well-being. The companies could use Pixza’s evaluations and guidance to take on socially disadvantaged employees and provide the support needed to help them achieve self-suﬃciency. “We’re going to give them the exact same methodology that we used to become an empowering place and certify business owners as an empowering place,” Souza says. “Once they get certiﬁed, then they can start hiring directly from that same platform.” By sharing its methodology, Pixza was using its know-how to generate more employment opportunities for Agents of Change outside of its pizza business—something that, if successful, could dramatically scale up impact. Fortunately, this initiative also aligned with an emerging trend in the training sector toward online workforce programs. The pandemic had forced many companies to move their business processes online, something that Pixza could take advantage of by creating digitized training programs. Souza foresaw an HR-type platform with two diﬀerent interfaces. One would be oriented toward employers to get them certiﬁed as an inclusive enterprise. The other would enable their Agents of Change recruits to start their training in advance, even while they were in a homeless shelter. “Our future employees can log on to our platform and take the entire training onsite, while being in their shelters, which will allow them to jump-start the empowerment program,” Souza says. “When they graduate from the online program, they will be eligible to be employed. So, it becomes an employment platform that culminates at the possibility of ﬁnding an oﬀer.” With this new concept in place, Pixza was able to separate the social impact from the pizzeria business and use it for further scaling. They imagined that the model could be shipped to any part of the world. “If a ﬁrm wants to learn how to be an empowering and inclusive institution, it can receive the tools today and can start doing it,” Souza says. The new model moved beyond the demonstration stage when a middle-sized chain restaurant in Mexico signed on to ﬁll a hundred new positions with Agents of Change in the coming year. A Postpandemic Future By focusing on its purpose and mission, Pixza moved on from the pizzeria model to establish several new lines of business that promised to shield it from the pandemic and dramatically expand its impact. But COVID-19 and the ripples it has caused are not over yet. “We are still in this hell of a ride,” Souza says. “If we’re going to survive, it will be because we are resilient and very creative. But most importantly it is because we have kept our mission ﬁrst. We’ve done all of these pivots to continue our mission. For the time being, we are happy where we stand. And we think we’re going to make it.” Souza is not alone in his optimism. “We are conﬁdent that a lot of companies will join their initiative and will be looking to add value through replicating our business model, especially now that ESG [environmental, social, and governance] investing has become such an important trend,” married Pixza investors Gómez and Leal say. “We are sure that the company will keep growing in all its different business units. The company has the best team and business partners, which are the keystones for the success of the business.” Pixza demonstrates the power that a compelling purpose can have when clearly understood and leveraged by an entrepreneur. The future of Pixza will be spreading its purpose beyond its own operations, something the company’s newest shareholders are betting on. Q Copyright of Stanford Social Innovation Review is the property of Stanford Social Innovation Review and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder’s express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at www.emeraldinsight.com/0025-1747.htm Towards a multidisciplinary definition of innovation Towards a definition of innovation Anahita Baregheh Bangor University, Bangor, UK 1323 Jennifer Rowley Manchester Metropolitan University, Manchester, UK, and Sally Sambrook Received November 2008 Revised February 2009 Accepted February 2009 Bangor University, Bangor, UK Abstract Purpose – This paper aims to undertake a content analysis of extant definitions of “innovation” as a basis for proposing an integrative definition of organizational “innovation”. Design/methodology/approach – A literature review was used to generate a representative pool of definitions of organizational innovation, including definitions from the different disciplinary literatures of economics, innovation and entrepreneurship, business and management, and technology, science and engineering. A content analysis of these definitions was conducted in order to surface the key attributes mentioned in the definitions, and to profile the descriptors used in relation to each attribute. Findings – The key attributes in the paper present in definitions were identified as: nature of innovation; type of innovation; stages of innovation, social context; means of innovation; and aim of innovation. These attributes are defined, descriptors assigned to them, and both a diagrammatic definition and a textual definition of organizational innovation are proposed. Originality/value – As a concept that is owned and discussed by many business disciplines, “innovation” has many different definitions that align with the dominant paradigm of the respective disciplines. Building on these diverse definitions, this paper proposes a general and integrative definition of organizational “innovation” that encompasses the different perspectives on, and aspects of, innovation, and captures its essence. Keywords Innovation, Organizational innovation, United Kingdom Paper type Research paper Introduction This paper focuses on innovation within business organisations and environments. As marketplaces become more dynamic, interest in innovation, its processes and management has escalated. Organizations need to innovate in response to changing customer demands and lifestyles and in order to capitalise on opportunities offered by technology and changing marketplaces, structures and dynamics. Organizational innovation can be performed in relation to products, services, operations, processes, and people. As long ago as Schumpeter, 1950 argued that organisations should innovate in order to renew the value of their asset endowment. Even before this, whilst Management Decision the term innovation may not have been used extensively, processes that are associated Vol. 47 No. 8, 2009 with innovation and economic and technological change were perceived as being pp. 1323-1339 Limited important (Lorenzi et al., 1912; Veblen, 1899; Schumpeter, 1934). Although we recognise q Emerald Group Publishing0025-1747 DOI 10.1108/00251740910984578 this, in this paper we focus only on explicit definitions of innovation. Zahra and Covin MD 47,8 1324 (1994, p. 183) suggest that “Innovation is widely considered as the life blood of corporate survival and growth”. Innovation is recognised to play a central role in creating value and sustaining competitive advantage. Bessant et al. (2005, p. 1366) on the role of innovation in renewal and growth emphasise “Innovation represents the core renewal process in any organization. Unless it changes what it offers the world and the way in which it creates and delivers those offerings it risks its survival and growth prospects”. The significance of innovation is not restricted to business organizations. The US has a Department for Innovation (2008), and in the UK there has been widespread and ongoing acknowledgement of the importance of innovation. In 2003, the Department of Trade commented on the link between continuous innovation and jobs, profit and standard of living: “If UK-based companies fail to innovate, jobs and profits will suffer, and our standard of living will fall compared with other countries”. More recently, the UK’s Department for Innovation Universities and Skills (2008) commented on the wider implications of innovation in the face of globalisation and environmental challenges by highlighting the importance of all types of innovation in creating and maintaining competencies and responding to environmental and demographic restrictions. There is agreement that in order to both sustain their competitive position and to strengthen it, organizations and economies must innovate and promote innovation. Innovation is a key policy and strategic issue. Innovation is tightly coupled to change, as organizations use innovation as a tool in order to influence an environment or due to their changing environments (internal and external) (Damanpour, 1991). However, innovation may involve a wide range of different types of change depending on the organization’s resources, capabilities, strategies, and requirements. Common types of innovation relate to new products, materials, new processes, new services, and new organizational forms (Ettlie and Reza, 1992). These different forms of innovation draw to varying extents on different teams, departments, and professional disciplines. Therefore, innovation is of interest to practitioners and researchers across a range of business and management disciplines, and has been discussed variously in, for example, the literature on human resource management, operations management, entrepreneurship, research and development, information technology, engineering and product design, and marketing and strategy. Each of these different disciplines proposes definitions for innovation that align with the dominant paradigm of the discipline. As Damanpour and Schneider (2006, p. 216) state: “Innovation is studied in many disciplines and has been defined from different perspectives”. Whilst there is some overlap between the various definitions of innovation, overall the number and diversity of definitions leads to a situation in which there is no clear and authoritative definition of innovation. As early as 1984, Ettlie et al. (1984) commented on the problems for research and practice of innovation arising from this disciplinary void. More recently, both Zairi (1994) and Cooper (1998) have suggested that one of the challenges of innovation is the lack of a common definition, which undermines understanding of the nature of innovation. A general definition adaptable to different disciplines and covering different aspects of innovation would be beneficial as “the term ‘innovation’ is notoriously ambiguous and lacks either a single definition or measure” (Adams et al., 2006, p. 22). Our emerging research questions draw on the work of Kahn et al. (2003), p. 197) who highlight the requirements for clarification of defining innovation “beyond just the typical extremes of incremental and radical innovation?” Also, Danneels and Kleinschmidt (2003) emphasize the importance of a better understanding of product innovativeness. So, what are the key definitions of innovation? How do these vary between different disciplines? What are the similarities and differences? Is it possible and helpful to construct a universal definition? In this paper, our aim is to identify one multi-disciplinary definition of innovation Addressing these research questions, we suggest that one common clarified definition of innovation will not only provide a better understanding of the notion of innovation for the diverse range of practitioners within organisations, but will also enable researchers to collaborate more closely to more holistically investigate this complex concept. The purpose of this article is to further develop understanding of the concept of innovation and to arrive at an integrative definition, based on a content analysis of previous definitions. A particular and important contribution of this article is that our analysis is based on 60 definitions from different disciplinary traditions and paradigms, thus providing a first attempt to capture the “essence” and produce an integrative, cross-disciplinary definition of innovation. Another important question, but beyond the scope of this article is: How do definitions of innovation vary over time? We hope to address this in a future paper. Our paper is structured as follows. First, we present a short literature review, reflecting on some of the previous definitions of innovation in order to illustrate the similarities and differences, the next section explains the methodology associated with the collection of the definitions, and the content analysis of the 60 distinct definitions that have been identified. This is followed by a findings section, which reports on the key attributes of the innovation definitions and the frequency of occurrence of descriptors to describe those attributes. On this basis, a model for the definition of innovation, together with a succinct textual definition of innovation is proposed. We conclude with recommendations and a brief discussion of the limitations of the paper. Literature review To demonstrate the diversity of the definitions of innovation and to press the case for the development of an integrative definition, we offer a few examples of definitions of organizational innovation where some emphasize different aspects of innovation and others are dedicated to a discipline. Thompson’s (1965, p. 2) early and straightforward definition simply states: “Innovation is the generation, acceptance and implementation of new ideas, processes products or services”. A similar definition of innovation was proposed more recently by West and Anderson (1996) and quoted as recently as 2008 by Wong et al. (2008, p. 2): “Innovation can be defined as the effective application of processes and products new to the organization and designed to benefit it and its stakeholders”. On the other hand, Kimberly (1981, p. 108) defines innovation from a different perspective which embraces different forms of innovation: “There are three stages of innovation: innovation as a process, innovation as a discrete item including, products, programs or services; and innovation as an attribute of organizations.” Some scholars place emphasis on the degree of newness. For instance, quoting Van du Ven et al. (1986) state that, “As long as the idea is perceived as new to the people involved, it is an ‘innovation’ even though it may appear to others to be an ‘imitation’ of something Towards a definition of innovation 1325 MD 47,8 1326 that exists elsewhere”. Newness is also associated with change. Damanpour (1996, p. 694) provides a detailed definition of innovation, which is much quoted: Innovation is conceived as a means of changing an organization, either as a response to changes in the external environment or as a pre-emptive action to influence the environment. Hence, innovation is here broadly defined to encompass a range of types, including new product or service, new process technology, new organization structure or administrative systems, or new plans or program pertaining to organization members. Other variations in the definition of innovation arise from different disciplinary perspectives. For example in knowledge management, the focus is on knowledge being vital for innovation or even a type of innovation. As Plessis (2007, p. 21) notes: Innovation as the creation of new knowledge and ideas to facilitate new business outcomes, aimed at improving internal business processes and structures and to create market driven products and services. Innovation encompasses both radical and incremental innovation. In technologically related definitions, the main focus is on innovation being a product related to new technology (Nord and Tucker, 1987). Methodology Aims This study aims to: . Identify the recurring attributes of “innovation” that are included in diverse definitions of innovation. . Propose both a diagrammatic model and a simple textual definition which together act as a basis for summarizing the essence of “innovation”. Gathering definitions The first stage in the research was to collect as many definitions as possible of the term “innovation”. In this process, it was important to achieve representation over time and across disciplines. The definitions were gathered through a thorough literature review of articles on innovation, and innovation types and processes, using online databases, journals and books. In addition, as the number of definitions identified in some areas is far less than others, the relevant journals for those specific areas were further reviewed and the text of each article on innovation was examined to see whether they proposed a new definition; for example, in the area of organization studies, key journals such as Management Science, Journal of Management Studies, Organization Science and Administrative Science Quarterly were reviewed. However, in general, articles in these journals refer to definitions of innovation proposed elsewhere rather than offering their own definition. Ultimately some 60 definitions of innovation were collected from the various disciplinary literatures, as shown in the following: . Business and management: 18 definitions from 1966 to 2007. . Economics: nine definitions from 1934 to 2004. . Organization studies: six definitions from 1953 to 2008. . Innovation and entrepreneurship: nine definitions from 1953 to 2007. . Technology, science and engineering: 13 definitions from 1969 to 2005. . . Knowledge management: three definitions from 1999 to 2007. Marketing: two definitions from 1994 to 2004. Table I presents the authors, the year and the discipline of the gathered definitions. Full citations of each of these papers are listed in the references at the end of the article. Analysis A content analysis was conducted of the collected definitions in order to surface the key attributes mentioned in these definitions considering the disciplinary variations, and to profile the descriptors used in relation to each attribute. Content analysis is defined as “a research technique for the objective, systematic and quantitative description of the manifest content of communication” (Berelson, 1952, p. 8), or “any technique for making inferences by objectively and systematically identifying specified characteristics of messages” (Holsti, 1969, p. 14). We considered the definitions of innovation to be forms of communication and messages and we were seeking to identify the specified characteristics or attributes of these. Various phenomena can be counted in a content analysis, including, for example, actors, words or themes. What we were counting were the words, rather than authors or disciplines, although these do feature in our analysis. Content analysis was selected as the most appropriate as it “is an approach to the analysis of documents and texts . . . that seeks to quantify content in terms of predetermined categories and in a systematic and replicable manner” (Bryman, 2001, p. 177). Definitions of innovation are considered as sections of text, which are amenable to deconstruction into component attributes, which can be categorized and counted. However, from our search of the literature, there were no predetermined categories available. Therefore, we used a modified approach to content analysis, which enabled the construction of categories. This is similar to qualitative or ethnographic content analysis (Altheide, 1996; Bryman, 2001), where there is an emphasis on allowing categories to emerge out of the text. However, the categories emerged through transparent quantification (as demonstrated in the following) rather than the researchers simply generating these. In addition, care was taken with coding (to ensure discrete dimensions and mutually exclusive categories) and interpretation of meaning to ensure consistency, reliability and validity. To be more precise, the following steps have been taken in the content analysis: (1) Classification of definitions of innovation by their disciplinary orientation. (2) Cleaning the text in order to simplify the word frequency count process. For example, the word “process” has been used as two different concepts: process as a type of innovation; and, process as procedures or set of routines. To resolve this complication in the content analysis, “process” as a type of innovation remained the same but “process” as routine was changed to “procedure”. Another example is the words “technological” and “technical”, both referring to the same type of innovation; they have been used interchangeably and hence occurrences of these two terms have been merged and in the proposed definition the preferred term is “technical”. (3) Counting of word frequencies – The number of times words appeared in each set of definitions (disciplinary group) was counted using the word frequency query option of NVIVO8 software. Towards a definition of innovation 1327 Table I. List of sources of definitions categorized by disciplines Innovation and entrepreneurship (Barnett, 1953) (Drucker, 1985) (Kuhn, 1985) (Urabe and Child, 1988) (Lundvall, 1992) (Cumming, 1998) (Salavou, 2004) (Alves et al., 2005) (John Bessant and Tidd, 2007) Management (Swan et al., 1999) (Cardinal et al., 2001) (Plessis, 2007) Marketing (Porter, 1990) (Berthon et al., 2004) Business and management (Karger and Murdick, 1966) (Knight, 1967) (Caroll, 1967) (Becker and Whisler, 1967) (Shepard, 1967) (Daft, 1978) (Van de Ven, 1986) (Tushman and Nadler, 1986) (Lewis and Seibold, 1993) (Wolfe, 1994) (Brown, 1994) (Damanpour, 1996) (Klein and Sorra, 1996) (McGrath et al., 1996) (Mone et al., 1998) (Trott, 2005) (J. Freeman and Engel, 2007) (Damanpour, 1996) Organization study (Barnett, 1953) (Thompson, 1965) (Zaltman et al., 1973) (Kimberly, 1981} (M.A. West and Farr, 1991) (Garcı́a-Morales et al., 2008) Technology, science and engineering (Myers and Marquis, 1969) (Roy Rothwell and Gardiner, 1985) (During, 1986) (Nord and Tucker, 1987) (Badawy, 1988) (Damanpour and Gopalakrishnan, 1998) (Udwadia, 1990) (Sundbo, 1996) (Dunphy et al., 1996) (Tang, 1998) (Figueroa and Conceicao, 2000) (Smits, 2002) (Francis and Bessant, 2005) 1328 Economy (Schumpeter, 1934) (Mansfield, 1963) (C. Freeman, 1974) (Nelson and Winter, 1982; OECD, 1981) (Nelson and Winter, 1982) (Dosi, 1990) (Baumol, 2002) (Chen et al., 2004) (Roper and Love, 2004) MD 47,8 (4) Grouping of words with the same stem (e.g. implement, implementing, and implementation) in the word frequency results. (5) Elimination of the words, which appeared only once or twice in their set of definitions, or words, which are of no value, such as pronouns. It should be mentioned that for those disciplines that have fewer definitions such as knowledge management or marketing, the elimination process was performed more flexibly and cautiously. For example if the word “product” (that has been repeated frequently in the other disciplines) was represented in knowledge management definitions only once, it was not eliminated because its lack of repetition is a result of the few number of definitions in this discipline. (6) Identification of the innovation attributes from the word frequency counts. This process commenced with the definitions of innovation in business-management and economics disciplines as they have the greatest number of definitions in this study. (7) Clustering of the descriptors used in connection with each attribute for each discipline as shown in Table II. (8) Cross disciplinary analysis of the descriptors used for each attribute. For each attribute those words that have been used in common between a number of disciplines (suggesting similarity) were selected, and are highlighted in bold in Table II, and extracted and displayed in Table III. (9) The proposal of a diagrammatic and text definition of innovation. It should be noted in Table III, the counts for some descriptors exceed the total number of definitions; for example “new” has been repeated 76 times where there are only 60 definitions of innovation. This is due to the fact that the word “new” has appeared in some definitions more than once, for example: Innovation concerns processes of learning and discovery about new products, new production processes and new forms of economic organization, about which, ex ante, economic actors often possess only rather unstructured beliefs on some unexploited opportunities, and which, ex post, are generally checked and selected, in non centrally planned economies, by some competitive interactions, of whatever form in product market (Dosi, 1990, p. 299). Hence, out of the 76 times the term “new” has been used, on 34 occasions there has been repetition of the word in the same definition. Similarly, the term “organization” has been repeated more than once in some of the definitions, for instance: Innovation is a process that follows invention, being separated from invention in time. Invention is the creative act, while innovation is the first or early employment of an idea by one organization or a set of organizations with similar goals (Becker and Whisler, 1967, p. 463). Table IV summarises the total number of occurrences of words in the database of definitions, relative to the total number of definitions in which that word appears. Findings and discussion Tables II and III show the attributes of innovation definitions that have been identified through the content analysis. These six attributes form the basis for an integrative definition of innovation, since they have been surfaced from key definitions drawn from different disciplinary areas. It is important to note that these attributes are all in Towards a definition of innovation 1329 Table II. Result of first phase of innovation content analysis, word frequency count based on sector and attributes Product, 7 Process, 5 Service, 5 Program, 2 Adoption, 3 Creation, 4 Design, 2 Implementation, 2 Development, 2 Organization, 7 Firm, 6 Customer, 2 Developer, 2 External, 2 System, 2 Users, 2 Idea, 5 Resource, 4 Invention, 3 Technology, 3 Investment, 2 Market, 2 Creativity, 1 Superior, 4 Advantage, 2 Value, 2 Competition, 2 Influence, 2 Sustain, 2 Differentiation, 2 Type Stages Environment Aims Superior, 1 Business, 1 Economic, 2 Success, 2 Differentiation, 1 Economy, 2 Need, 2 Compete, 2 Success, 2 Economic, 2 Compete, 3 Idea, 3 Innovativeness, 3 Technology, 1 Invention, 1 Knowledge, 2 Idea, 1 Market, 1 Market, 6 Technology, 6 Creativity, 4 Invention, 4 Idea, 2 Innovativeness, 1 Idea, 5 Creativity, 5 Invention, 2 Innovativeness, 1 Economy, 2 Equipment, 2 Idea, 2 Industry, 2 Market, 2 Technology, 2 Firm, 5 Organization, 4 Group, 2 Unit, 2 Organization, 1 Product, 4 Process, 3 Service, 3 New, 4 Organization study Group, 1 Internal, 1 Organization, 1 Organization, 2 Users, 2 Customers, 1 Employee, 2 Organization, 2 Actor, 1 Consumer, 1 Customer, 1 Social system, 1 New, 3 Change, 2 Improve, 1 Product, 2 Process, 1 Service, 1 Marketing Adoption, 3 Application, 2 Development, 2 Program, 2 Generation, 3 Application, 2 evelopment, 2 Implementation, 2 Acceptance, 1 Creation, 1 Production, 4 Introduction, 3 Manufacturing, 3 Development, 2 Commercialization, 3 Product, 2 Incremental, 1 Process, 1 Radical, 1 Service, 1 Technical, 1 Creation, 2 Decision, 1 Design, 1 Development, 1 New, 2 Improve, 1 Knowledge management Learning, 1 Communication, 1 Adoption, 7 Development, 3 Generation, 7 Implementation, 2 ntroduction, 2 Commercialization, 4 Creation, 2 Organization, 12 Product, 4 Service, 4 Technical, 3 Product, 9 Process, 6 Service, 3 Technical, 3 New, 11 Challenge, 2 Change, 2 Product, 10 Service, 8 Process, 7 Technical, 3 Technology/science/ engineering New, 10 Change, 2 Innovation and entrepreneurship New, 24 Improved, 4 Economy 1330 Means New, 16 Change, 4 Nature Business and management MD 47,8 Attribute Word frequency count Nature of innovation New, 76 Change, 10 Improve, 6 Product, 40 Service, 25 Process, 23 Technical, 10 Competition, 7 Success, 6 Economy, 6 Superiority, 5 Differentiation, 3 Advantage, 2 Value, 2 Organization, 29 Firm, 11 Customer, 4 Group, 3 Unit, 2 Developer, 2 Employee, 2 External environment 2 Social system, 2 Workforce, 1 Consumer, 1 Internal environment, 1 Idea, 22 Invention, 12 Technology, 12 Market, 11 Creativity, 10 Adoption, 13 Development, 13 Creation, 9 Implementation, 6 Commercialization, 7 Type of innovation Aim of innovation Social context Means of innovation Stages of innovation Summary of attributes frequency Type of innovation, 98 Nature of innovation, 92 Means of innovation, 69 Innovation and people, 60 Stages of innovation, 48 Aim of innovation, 31 strong evidence not merely in discursive expositions on innovation management, but also in the definitions of the basic concept of innovation. These attributes are defined as follows: . Nature of innovation refers to the form of innovation as in something new or improved. . Type of innovation refers to the kind of innovation as in the type of output or the result of innovation, e.g. product or service. Towards a definition of innovation 1331 Table III. Summary of word frequencies grouped by attributes MD 47,8 1332 Table IV. Total word frequency versus number of times words has appeared by definition New Organization Product Firm Service Idea Invention Superior Improve Process Technical Market Creativity Change Implement Group Development Commercialization Technology Value Economic Success . . . . Total number of occurrences Number of occurrences in distinct definitions 76 29 40 11 25 22 12 5 6 23 10 11 10 10 6 3 13 7 12 2 6 6 42 15 33 4 21 18 8 2 4 21 8 9 8 9 5 2 12 6 11 1 5 5 Stages of innovation refers to all the steps taken during an innovation process which usually start from idea generation and end with commercialization. Social context refers to any social entity, system or group of people involved in the innovation process or environmental factors affecting it. Means of innovation refers to the necessary resources (e.g. technical, creative, financial) that need to be in place for innovation. Aim of innovation is the overall result that the organizations want to achieve through innovation. In arriving at this final list of attributes two issues have been taken into consideration: (1) One of the attributes of innovation, which only occurs in three of definitions relates to the time of innovation implementation or adoption in the context of specific industries. In this analysis, there are two definitions, which have paid attention to time of innovation by mentioning first or early use of innovation and there is one definition, which highlights the first use of innovation by the organization adopting it. For example, Rothwell (1992, p. 221) quotes Freeman as: The technical, design, manufacturing, management and commercial activities involved in the marketing of a new (or improved) product or the first use of a new (or improved) manufacturing process or equipment. Owing to the limited number of definitions considering the time of innovation, this attribute has been excluded from the definition proposed in this study. (2) Another term which occurs quite frequently is the word “process” which during the content analysis was replaced by “procedure” for simplification. Usage of this word was an indication of the fact that innovation is a process not a discrete act. (3) Analysis of Table III demonstrates that in defining innovation, scholars have paid more attention to type, means, social context and stages of innovation and have made relatively limited reference to the aim of innovation. This may potentially be evidence of a serious disconnection between the rhetoric of innovation and its strategic context. On the other hand, most research reports and articles on innovation start by explaining the strategic importance of innovation. So, thus perhaps this is simply an oversight in the definitions or a taken-for-granted assumption. Towards a definition of innovation 1333 On the basis of the key attributes of definitions of innovation and the descriptors used by those definitions to characterise the attributes, a diagrammatic definition of “innovation” is proposed in Figure 1. The diagram incorporates the six attributes identified as being common to the various disciplinary definitions of innovation. We do not suggest that this is the actual or ideal flow, or that the flow is linear. We do not give greater importance to “stages” or “aim” but simply suggest that these are six common, and therefore important, attributes of innovation. The model seeks to present the “essence” of innovation, no matter the organizational or disciplinary context. The six components of the model do not only describe the possible flow of the innovation process, they also indicate various starting points within the innovation process. This might be influenced by disciplinary background. For example, engineers might begin with a focus on the technical possibilities of a new product, whereas as marketing specialists might concentrate on identifying potential new markets. Individuals within organisations may choose different starting points on the journey to innovation. The chosen starting point might also have a strong relationship to the way innovation is achieved, or not. In order to capture and articulate the diagrammatic definition in Figure 1 in words by means of interpretation, we propose that: Figure 1. A diagrammatic definition of innovation MD 47,8 1334 Innovation is the multi-stage process whereby organizations transform ideas into new/improved products, service or processes, in order to advance, compete and differentiate themselves successfully in their marketplace. Our definition begins with the term “multi stage process” as most of the definitions presented earlier have highlighted that innovation is not a discrete act and is a process. Secondly, we focus on business organisations in this paper, although we have not explicitly articulated in our textual definition that innovation can occur in various social entities and contexts. Third, as shown in the diagram, many definitions have focused on the means of innovation, that is the ways in which ideas have been transformed into new, improved and changed entities, whether products or services, for example, for new markets. Therefore, a “multi stage process” together with “transforming ideas into new/improved products . . . ” not only captures all the stages that different scholars have identified or referred to in their definition of innovation, it also highlights the fact that ideas are used and transformed (together with other means of innovation) to result in “New/improved products, services or processes”, the main types of innovation identified together with the level of change they involve. Finally, although not often explicitly mentioned in extant definitions, we include the aim of innovation as “successfully advancing” (referring to process innovations) and “competing and differentiating” to reflect both the overall strategic aim of innovation and the potentially diverse social and environmental contexts in which innovation occurs. These diagrammatic and textual definitions, which seek to subsume and supersede earlier definitions with their specific disciplinary biases, recognize that an all-embracing definition of innovation needs to encompass a number of aspects of the essence of innovation. Conclusions and recommendations Innovation, and how it is managed, is a key strategic issue. It is of interest to both practitioners and researchers across a range of business and management disciplines. Having conducted a comprehensive content analysis, we have identified how different disciplines view innovation from a different standpoint and propose distinct definitions. It could be argued that each discipline requires it own discipline-specific definition. However, as business and research become more inter- and multi-disciplinary, we suggest there is a need for a more generic, integrative definition. This is to enable the development of common meaning and shared understanding of the various dimensions of innovation, identified in our proposed definition. We suggest that the number and diversity of current definitions of innovation creates ambiguity and confusion and we support McAdam et al.’s (2004) view that the absence of a consensual definition of innovation is problematic. To address this, on the basis of a content analysis of existing definitions of innovation, extracted from a number of different disciplines, we have proposed a succinct and arguably intuitive textual definition of innovation. The text version of the definition is supplemented by a diagrammatic definition, which identifies the descriptors that can be used to provide a more detailed definition. Such a definition should assist in crossing disciplinary boundaries, and act as a basis for more transparent sharing and transfer of knowledge relating to innovation and its processes. The objective in proposing a general definition of innovation has been to seek to offer a multidisciplinary definition for a multidisciplinary concept. There is evident need for such a definition and it has the potential to inform both practice and research. A consensus on the definition of innovation offers a way forward for the identification of innovation within organizations and countries. The typology of innovation, implicit in our diagrammatic definition offers a means of classifying innovations. For example, there is the opportunity to classify definitions on the basis of whether they bring forward something new, or improve an existing aspect of the organization (nature). Similarly, innovations may be classified as product, service, process or technical (type), and the resources or means used to drive and support innovation can be identified in respect of the balance of technology, ideas, inventions, creativity, and market (means). This type of analysis would be useful for businesses in strategy and planning, and would offer a useful framework for comparing different innovation processes in different organizations, towards knowledge-building. However, there are limitations with our paper. As a conceptual paper, we have produced our textual and diagrammatic definitions drawing on existing theoretical work from a range of business disciplines. In addition, although beyond the scope of this paper, we have noted there is evidence that the nature and focus of innovation has changed over time. Therefore, we propose adopting a chronological perspective in future research to explore how meanings of innovation have evolved, generally and specifically within disciplines. There is further empirical work to do to validate the proposed definition in terms of its suitability, usefulness and acceptability across different disciplinary groups and this is a clear agenda for further research. References Adams, R., Bessant, J. and Phelps, R. (2006), “Innovation management measurement: a review”, International Journal of Management Reviews, Vol. 8 No. 1, pp. 21-47. Altheide, D.L. (1996), Qualitative Media Analysis, Sage, Thousand Oaks, CA. Alves, J., Marques, M.J., Saur, I. and Marques, P. 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(1899), The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions, Unwin, London. West, M.A. and Anderson, N.R. (1996), “Innovation in top management teams”, Journal of Applied Psychology, Vol. 81, pp. 680-93. West, M.A. and Farr, J.L. (1991), Innovation and Creativity at Work: Psychological and Organizational Strategies, John Wiley & Sons, Chichester. Wolfe, R.A. (1994), “Organizational innovation – review, critique and suggested research directions”, Journal of Management Studies, Vol. 31 No. 3, pp. 405-31. Wong, A., Tjosvold, D. and Liu, C. (2008), “Innovation by teams in Shanghai, China: cooperative goals for group confidence and persistence”, British Journal of Management, available at: www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/fulltext/120123993/HTMLSTART (accessed August 15, 2008). Zahra, S.A. and Covin, J.G. (1994), “The financial implications of fit between competitive strategy and innovation types and sources”, The Journal of High Technology Management Research, Vol. 5 No. 2, pp. 183-211. Zairi, M. (1994), “Innovation or innovativeness? Results of a benchmarking study”, TQM Magazine, Vol. 5 No. 3, pp. 10-16. Zaltman, F.E., Duncan, R.B. and Holbek, J. (1973), Innovations and Organizations, John Wiley & Sons, New York, NY. Further reading Jayanthi, S. and Kingshuk, S.K. (1998), “Innovation implementation in high technology manufacturing: a chaos-theoretic empirical analysis”, Journal of Operations Management, Vol. 16 No. 4, pp. 471-94. Pouder, R. and StJohn, C.H. (1996), “Hot spots and blind spots: geographical clusters of firms and innovation”, Academy of Management Review, Vol. 21 No. 4, pp. 1192-225. Corresponding author Anahita Baragheh can be contacted at: [email protected] To purchase reprints of this article please e-mail: [email protected] Or visit our web site for further details: www.emeraldinsight.com/reprints Towards a definition of innovation 1339 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Industry and Innovation ISSN: 1366-2716 (Print) 1469-8390 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ciai20 Cooking under Fire: Managing Multilevel Tensions between Creativity and Innovation in Haute Cuisine Christel Lane & Daniela Lup To cite this article: Christel Lane & Daniela Lup (2015) Cooking under Fire: Managing Multilevel Tensions between Creativity and Innovation in Haute Cuisine, Industry and Innovation, 22:8, 654-676, DOI: 10.1080/13662716.2015.1113861 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/13662716.2015.1113861 Published online: 19 Feb 2016. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 3062 View related articles View Crossmark data Citing articles: 3 View citing articles Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=ciai20 Industry and Innovation, 2015 Vol. 22, No. 8, 654–676, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13662716.2015.1113861 Cooking under Fire: Managing Multilevel Tensions between Creativity and Innovation in Haute Cuisine CHRISTEL LANE* & DANIELA LUP** * ** University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK; London School of Economics, London, UK ABSTRACT This inductive study of Michelin-starred restaurants in Britain and Germany examines how organizations attend to tensions between idea creation and implementation that characterize innovation processes. Based on the analysis of in-depth interviews with 40 chefs-de-cuisine, we identify tensions at two distinct levels of analysis. The first tension, situated at the individual level, occurs between the artistic identity of the chefs-de-cuisine and their work identity; the second one, at the organizational level, arises because creativity and implementation are equally important for the organizational success, thus making it impossible to disentangle chefs’ contribution from that of the kitchen brigade. Case evidence shows that effective tactics for managing these tensions simultaneously emphasize distinctions and create synergies between the contradictory elements of each tension. Moreover, our cross-national sample allows us to show how differences at the national institutional level affect the management of tensions and thus shed light on the mechanisms through which institutional environments affect innovation. These insights contribute to existing research in creativity and innovation. KEYWORDS: Germany Creativity; innovation; implementation; haute cuisine; multilevel analysis; tensions; Britain and 1. Introduction Research on organizational creativity has established that creativity and innovation are two distinct concepts and parts of the same process (Amabile 1996; West 2002). Creativity, the first stage of the innovation process, is generally conceptualized as the development of novel ideas, the “thinking about new things” (West 2002, 357). The implementation of creative ideas is the second part of the process, the stage during which novel ideas become products and services (West 2002; West and Farr 1990). Implicit in this conceptualization is that successful innovation is not reducible to the production of novel ideas, but that it requires the implementation of those ideas so that they Correspondence Address: Daniela Lup, Department of Management, London School of Economics and Political Science, Houghton Street, London WC2A 2AE, United Kingdom. Email: [email protected] Ó 2016 Taylor & Francis Managing Multilevel Tensions between Creativity and Innovation in Haute Cuisine 655 may be deemed valuable by organizational stakeholders. Thus, successful organizations must excel at both stages. Existing research has made considerable contributions to our understanding of factors that affect the production of ideas and of innovative outcomes in organizations (Amabile et al. 1996; Damanpour 1991; Scott and Bruce 1994; Shalley and Gilson 2004). However, this body of work is only of limited use when we try to under…

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