Management Innovation: Taking Stock and Looking Ahead

Firms frequently renew their administrative systems, change organizational structure, experiment with reward systems, and configure organizational design in novel ways. Such changes of formal and informal ways of coordinating activities and motivating employees may amount to innovations, that is, ways of doing things that are new, as a minimum to the firm, but occasionally even to the world.

In spite of what would seem to be the obvious importance of management innovation to firms, industries and perhaps even whole economies, rather little research exists that is explicitly directed to management innovation. Only recently has the concept of management innovation been explicitly introduced in the management literature and treated as an important phenomenon in its own right.

This conference intends to further our understanding of management innovations. Therefore, the conference invites scholars from a variety of fields to elaborate upon theoretical and empirical issues that may be of relevance to the field of management innovation. Issues from the following, non-exhaustive, list of topics may be addressed:

To what extent can we draw upon contributions from related fields of study, such as the change management, organization theory and innovation literatures, to better understand management innovation?

What factors lead companies to adopt new management practices or organizational structures and what distinguishes innovators from mitators?

To what extent should we be interested in environmental and external drivers vis-à-vis factors internal to the organization, such as top management teams, R&D expenditure, organizational design or culture?

How may we theoretically and empirically link management innovation to firm performance?

What are promising directions for future research on management innovation?

We encourage both conceptual and empirical contributions addressing these issues.

Confirmed key-note speakers for the conference include Professor Julian Birkinshaw (London Business School), Professor Edward Zajac (Kellogg School of Management), and Professor Richard Burton (Fuqua School of Business, Duke University).