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Process management and technological innovation: a longitudinal study of the photography and paint industries
Administrative Science Quarterly, Dec, 2002 by Mary J. Benner, Michael Tushman
Finally, our research has implications for practice. Managers must exercise care against the great institutional pressures pushing process management activities (e.g., Cole and Scott, 2000). The certainty of exploitation and incremental innovation, so functional in more certain strategic contexts, may drive process management activities into organizational domains that require variation. Senior managers who effectively explore and exploit may do so through concerted efforts to buffer variation-creating innovations from process management activities (e.g., Tushman and O'Reilly, 1997). It may be that senior leaders can build organizational architectures that can simultaneously handle exploitation and the associated process management activities, even as they facilitate exploration in organizational domains that are shielded from process management activities. Such senior teams must develop cognitive models such that they can simultaneously operate across different selection environments and time frames (Tushman and O'Reilly, 1997; Gavetti and Levinthal, 2000; Tripsas and Gavetti, 2000).
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Even as organizations are exhorted to innovate in times of rapid technological change, process management activities focused on mapping, incrementally improving, and adhering to organizational processes have been widely adopted. These activities aimed at refining and stabilizing processes may be in conflict with exploratory innovation required for adaptation as environments change. This research contributes to understanding how a pervasive organizational metaprocess, in this case, process management activities, affects technological innovation. Evidence from our large-sample longitudinal study in the photography and paint industries over a twenty-year period indicates that increasing the use of process management activities tips the innovation balance toward exploitation at the expense of exploration. Process management heuristics may indeed enhance short-term effectiveness even as they contribute to inertia and, in turn, dampen environmental responsiveness. These results suggest caution in adopting process management programs as well as a more nuanced approach to creating organizations that can celebrate both variance reduction in the service of exploitation and variance creation in the service of exploration. Finally, these results highlight the benefits of more fine-grained measures of exploitation and exploratory innovation as well as suggest that subsequent work might profitably explore the relations among organizational designs, process management activities, and organizational outcomes.
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