Managing Strategic Innovation and Change - Review

Administrative Science Quarterly,  June, 1999  by M. Anjali Sastry

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Michael L. Tushman and Philip Anderson, eds. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. 672 pp. $69.95, cloth; $41.95, paper.

Innovation, Tushman and Anderson argue, is the linchpin of economic growth and lies behind improvements in every aspect of modern life. How are we to understand it? How can we encourage it? Tushman and Anderson assemble a varied set of papers, all but two of which have appeared elsewhere, to make the case that innovation is complex, cross-functional, and historically dependent, with inescapable tensions, trade-offs, and paradoxes at its core. The book's framework relies on a blend of theory, research, and anecdotal evidence to make a central point: without a multifaceted understanding of innovation, attempts to manage, encourage, and make the most of it are unlikely to succeed. Managing innovation, we are told, requires that we accept that forces within the organization - and within the industry - will often conflict. The book offers a rich set of ideas about how to address such challenges, for instance, by inviting organizations to develop ambidexterity, by recognizing the dual role that people and organizational architectures must play as forces for change and for continuity, and by encouraging redundancy within the organization.

It would be hard to disagree with the argument that the editors advance in the preface and section introductions: innovation must be examined in context, which includes the industry setting and industry dynamics as well as the competitive landscape and the role that technology plays in each industry. Within the organization, the context for innovation includes how the organization is managed, the links between different functional areas and interfaces with the external world, as well as the organization's cross-functional competencies and its ability to address the twin tasks of managing for efficiency and managing for adaptiveness.

Such a framing of the challenges of innovation is fruitful on several grounds: it helps to organize the points made in the wide variety of papers presented in this collected volume, and it provides practitioner's with a potential map for locating the tools they may need to manage innovation. For it is the management of innovation that lies at the heart of this book: its concern is the perspectives, theories, approaches, and managerial mental models needed to generate, refine, and implement innovation. To the authors, innovation and change are intertwined - innovation necessitates change, and an organization's capacity to manage change is integral to its management of innovation.

Tushman and Anderson's framing is also useful because it underscores how understanding innovation requires that we recognize the breadth and multiplicity of processes, perspectives, and issues involved, as well as the dynamic unfolding over time of these features. While organizational theorists are rightly concerned with the issues such an approach raises - broadening the boundaries of our study, adding a longitudinal perspective - because it may enrich research, Tushman and Anderson emphasize the practical importance of a wide-ranging, dynamic perspective. In fact, a key goal of the book is to help managers to build better mental models. Arguing that experience alone cannot provide enough examples from which to draw valid conclusions, the editors make a case for theorizing and research on innovation. Such an argument, in turn, hints at a potential ongoing problem at the interface of scholarship and practice in this area, because it suggests that managers have not yet fully recognized the value of research on innovation. Given the book's joint audience of researchers and practitioners, it would be interesting to evaluate how the study of innovation has fared so far. In what ways has it succeeded? In what ways has it fallen short? The answer, I suspect, is that the record is mixed; perhaps it has to do with the difficulty of extracting lessons learned from the field's far-ranging and eclectic array of case studies, theoretical papers, and empirical analyses.

Such difficulty confronts the reader of this book. The forty-one papers present a diverse patchwork of ideas, points of view, and research findings. For instance, Stephen Jay Gould's observations on the development of technology draw on the broad sweep of evolutionary theory, while authors in section 5, "Managing Functional Competencies," describe how specific areas of the organization innovate. Effort is rewarded, however, and the reader who reads even a sampling of the varied papers begins to develop a sense of the complexity of the phenomenon as well as a feeling of admiration for Tushman and Anderson's ability to draw the elements of the patchwork together in the framing presented in the preface. And while the loose stitching together of the patchwork - each paper is presented as it first appeared elsewhere - gives full voice to each author's perspective, the reader is left with some tasks that a closer integration would have taken care of. For instance, many papers refer to other work that appears in this volume or to ideas that are related to other papers here, and yet readers must figure this out on their own. Several papers refer to the same organizations or to firms in the same industry, but here, too, it is the reader's task to integrate and contrast. Another problem is a tendency for some material to be redundant, as authors restate ideas presented elsewhere. And while the blend of normative and descriptive writing is a potential strength, as each may inform the other, the full value of such a mix is unrealized here; readers must make the comparisons and assessments on their own.