Mobilising Differential Visions for New Product Innovation
David Sarpong and Mairi Maclean
Please cite as: Sarpong, D. and Maclean, M. (2012) ‘Mobilising Differential Visions for New Product Innovation’. Technovation, 32(12), 694-702.
1. Introduction
Daily translation of breakthrough insights into winning products has put visioning firmly on the agenda of many innovating firms.Conceptualised as a dominant logic of organising (Prahalad and Bettis, 1995), the innovation academy have dedicated considerable attention to studying the emergence and impact of visioning on new product development (see Howells, 1997;Lynn and Akgun, 2001; Swanson and Ramiller, 1997; Swanson and Ramiller, 1997; Tessarolo, 2007). In this light, a whole range of metrics, embedded modalities, and contingencies have been identified to support visioning at the product innovation level (Bond and Houston, 2003; Maine and Garnsey, 2006; Neimes, 1996). However, while new product innovation is simply about the synchronisation of technologies and market opportunities (Jolly, 1997), recurrent themes on visioning have focused either on the technology or on the market challenge component of the innovation process. For example, while Reid and Roberts (2011) explored the scaling of technology vision in radically new, high-tech products, others (e.g. Colarelli O’Connor and Veryzer, 2001) have also concentrated their efforts in extending our understanding of visioning on the identification of specific market applications for technologies.
It is fair to note among these streams of studies the existence of a tacit assumption that innovation teams are the fundamental locus of visioning. However, this locus-related attribution tends to discount the contribution of other stakeholders to the visioning process from both the market and technology perspective. Although recent research has highlighted the role of other stakeholders including customers in the visioning process (Colarelli O’Connor and Veryzer, 2001; von Hippel, 2005), questions remain concerning how innovation teams mobilise the differential visions of stakeholders towards the material realisation of new product innovations. These questions are often sidestepped due to the theoretical and methodological complexities involved in mapping the tasks, connections and architectures that the process requires. The research described in this paper endeavours to address this challenge by exploring how product innovation teams mobilise the visions of other stakeholders through consensual integration to enact a shared image of future innovations. Thus, the paper contributes to theory building not just by analysing how innovation teams mobilise stakeholders’ visions, but also by exploring how incongruence in stakeholders’ vision could impact on realised innovations.
The paper provides new insight into the management and innovation literature in the following ways: (1) First, while prior studies have stressed the importance of involving many stakeholders in the visioning process, this paper attempts to explore the contingency role of innovation teams in mobilising stakeholders’ differential visions towards an idealised future. (2) Second, employing a qualitative case study approach, the paper explores the concept of visioning from both a technology and a market perspective, as manifested in the actions and practices of product innovation teams in context. We develop our contribution in the context of the software industry, and focus more specifically on product innovation teams, who are often relied upon as a strategic group within organisations to exploit distributed expertise and limited organisational resources to craft and deliver a mechanism for building an organisational market-technology knowledge base (Dougherty, 1992).
The paper is structured as follows: We begin with a review of the existing literature that underpins this study. Next, the temporary ties between the visioning activities of innovation teams and those of other organising layers of innovation projects are examined to establish how they enable or constrain the building and sustenance of a product vision. Following this is the research design and methodology, which provides an overview of the empirical research context and the methods employed in the empirical inquiry. Findings from the research are presented and discussed, after which the study’s implications for management theory and practice are highlighted in the conclusion.
2. Product vision and the visioning processes at the project level
The innovation literature frequently describes a product vision as the ontological representation of an idealised future product. Often articulated in the form of a vocabulary of knowledge such as ‘insight’, ‘metaphors’, and ‘images’, a product vision, as argued by Crawford and Di Benedetto (2003), serves as a mental image of a yet-to-be-realised product. Considered as a metaphor for human imagination, a product vision serves as an ideational ‘narcotic’ for the emergence of novel solutions through which potentialities and limits leading to productive outcomes can be creatively evaluated (Canongia et al., 2004; Reid and Roberts, 2011; Song et al., 1997). While research into the emergence of product vision has remained at the theoretical level, more recent contributions have explored the effectiveness of product vision in framing customers’ problems which require solutions (Brown and Eisenhardt, 1995; Lilien and Yoon, 1989; Reid and Brentani, 2010). Worthy of note is the view that product vision helps mobilise current potential to move in the direction of tactical and technical goals. Through an empirical study of team vision on 78 product development projects, Ravilla and Rodríguez (2011) found that those teams that made a trade-off between knowledge exploration and exploitation displayed what they call an effective vision. Lynn and Akgun (2001) also identified vision clarity, vision support and vision stability as the three components of a pragmatic vision at the project level. However, they concede that different types of innovations require varying degrees of visioning to be successful.
Constituted in human action, the iterative process of developing and bringing visions into representation to guide present actions is what has been referred to as ‘visioning’ (Lyn and Akgun, 2001; Revillam and Rodríguez, 2011).Tessarolo (2007: 74) describes it as ‘a firm’s ability to define clear objectives and a well-organised strategy for the development process and to share these objectives and strategy with all those involved in the development’. Visioning from this perspective can be seen as a boundary-spanning activity (Tushman, 1977) aimed at creating ‘foresightful’ knowledge relevant for bridging the epistemic gaps between past, present and future markets and technologies. Yet the processes of visioning are seldom explicated in the literature. An exception is the work of Andriopoulos and Gotsi (2006), which draws on the theory of foresight to propose perpetual experimentation, alliances, brainstorming, knowledge brokering, scanning the external environment, and blue-sky projects as the fundamental processes that constitutively underpin visioning in teams. Elsewhere, O’Connor and Veryzer (2001) identified motivation, insight and elaboration as the three elements that enable the successful visioning of market opportunities for radical technology-based innovations. Wartburg et al. (2003) also found that visioning for innovation involves the exploration and exploitation of knowledge into innovative activities from sources other than familiar customers. Theoretical explanations for these findings often focus on the idea that visioning encourages the enactment of collective sense-making (Weick, 1995), and make possible the attainment of stretch goals (Locke and Latham, 1984). At the other end of the spectrum, inadequate or poor visioning might lead to ‘vision failure’, and the ultimate loss of opportunities to create or capture relevant value form innovation (March, 1995; Sapsed, 2010).
In recent times, the role and contribution of other stakeholders in the visioning process has received scholarly attention, particularly in the software industry. Park and Maurer (2009) found that the communication medium of ‘blogging’ enables groups such as developers and testers to contribute to the generation of software product vision through storytelling and ‘demos’ for generating innovative software system requirements. Molin-Juustila et al. (2002) developed the MAPID model which, they argue, could be used as a communicating tool between different stakeholders to build ‘product-market-user’ vision in the early phases of new software development projects. Surprisingly, while this stream of studies implicitly or explicitly acknowledge the importance of involving several stakeholders in the visioning process, empirical work focusing on the contingent role of innovation units mobilizing such visions is simply non-existent. Consequently, our effort to explore how relevant behavioural and discursive tendencies by innovation teams in context might enable the mobilisation of stakeholders’ differential visions. We follow previous research to conceptualise visioning as the creative evaluation and reconfiguration of stakeholders’ differential visions in the form of potentialities and limits leading to productive outcomes. The main research questions driving this empirical inquiry are as follows:
- How do innovation teams embedded in high-velocity environments mobilise stakeholders’ expressions of the future into an idealised future vision?
- What happens when project stakeholders’ differential visions are not effectively mobilised into a shared, idealised vision?
3. Conceptual framework: organising stakeholders differential visions of the future
The essence of visioning at the product innovation level is to mobilise stakeholders’ differential visions towards the realisation of a shared image of future innovations. This, we argue, occurs in the context of a complicated web of relationships between the differential visions of various project ecologies (Biemans, 1991). ‘Project ecologies’, as used here, refer to the various epistemic communities which temporarily coalesce for the completion of the product innovation project (Grabher, 2002; 2004). We follow Tushman (1977) to disaggregate the ecological network of new product innovation projects in the software industry into the epistemic communities of the larger organisation (consisting of management and other functional areas such as marketing and sales), bespoke project sponsors or customers (external boundary), and the innovating subsystem (core innovation team) which serves as a central actor in the network.
Each of these ecologies plays a vital role in realising the future innovation. While the organisation provides the direction, space and resources, the customers, as potential users of the product, provide useful knowledge in the form of wants, needs and emerging trends; the innovation team, on the other hand, employs this knowledge to develop the new product. Understood metaphorically, the organisation may be seen to furnish the cooking utensils, the customers provide the ingredients, while the innovation team does the cooking. However, project ecologies often have alternative and/or competing visions due to their varied taken-for-granted assumptions, perceptions, fears, value systems and needs. In this scenario, we argue that the innovation team, conceptualised as protagonists of the future, is responsible for inspiring, negotiating, directing, mobilising, and synthesising the differential visions of the respective ecologies into a shared or idealised future that enables the conversion of opportunities, in the form of potentialities and limits, into resources and productive outcomes (Fransman, 1999). In this regard, they are responsible for developing the broad outline of the vision which serves as a reference point, or what van der Helm (2009: 101), citing Polak, (1961), describes as ‘a magnet that through its attractive force pulls the present [visions] towards an envisioned future’.
[INSERT FIGURE1 HERE]
As shown in Figure 1, the individual visions of the three ecologies are not independent of each other. Through ongoing triadic material and human interactions, the vision of each of the ecology is supported, influenced and shaped by that of the other ecologies. The locus of mobilisation lies in the relationships between the project ecologies, in the interaction, and not in the individual ecologies per se. In this way, the innovation team is able to obtain the necessary knowledge to develop products that satisfy the objectives, needs and preferences of the ecological network (Hoopes and Postrel, 1999). These interactions also help the innovation team to enact flexible activity systems, build homogenous repertoires, expectations and obligations which constitutively enable it to engage in creative interventions geared towards the identification of inherent potentialities and limits of the various visions and their implications for the soon-to-be-realised innovation.
4. Research design and methodology
As part of a research program on the emergence of strategic foresight in organisations embedded in high-velocity environments, we develop our contribution in the context of the fast-moving global software industry characterised by complex evolving technologies and markets (D‘Aveni, 1994; Eisenhardt and Tabrizi, 1995). In order to improve the replicability of the study and generalisability of the insights generated, we employed a multiple case study design (Ghauri and Grønhaug, 2002; Yin, 2003), usingthree software firms involved in the pioneering of a series of innovative products for different market segments. Since all three organisations at the time of data collection were running more than one project, the following theoretical sampling criteria was used to select the projects included in the empirical inquiry to reduce their variations while enhancing their commonalities:
(i) Project(s) should require the commitment of significant resources to be pioneered.
(ii) Project(s) should entail the development or generation of innovative product(s) incorporating new or unfamiliar technology of the organisation and/or marketed to unfamiliar users.
(iii) Project(s) must employ Microsoft’s technologies, including their user and data interfaces, in creating the platform architectures on which the products are built.
The selected cases not only facilitated an extensive exploration of the phenomenon of visioning in practice; in the words of Eisenhardt and Graebner (2007: 29), they also allowed the study to tell a ‘better story’ and enabled subsequent elucidation of particular insights that allowed inferences to be drawn concerning other organisations embedded in high-velocity environments. Table 1 provides a comparative summary of the three case study companies.
[INSERT TABLE 1 HERE]
Our chosen level of analysis for the inquiry was the product innovation teams of these firms because they represent the very ‘level at which observable changes take place in the way work is done and the management of innovation process can be witnessed’ (Birkinshaw et al., 2008: 282). As the innovation teams served as the locus for the development of new products that provide the bedrock for strategic diversification and corporate renewal (Dougherty, 1992), the organisations studied relied solely on these strategic units to exploit their distributed expertise and limited resources in linking their complex technologies to their markets. Given the paucity of existing research emphasising ‘practice’ as the site for the mobilisation of differential visions, an explorative qualitative approach was found to be much more meaningful and appropriate for the study (Lincoln and Guba, 1986). An exploratory research design and methodology was adopted as it was considered useful to develop theoretical insights into a ‘contemporary phenomenon within its real life context, especially when the boundaries between phenomenon and context are not clearly evident’ (Yin, 1994: 13). All three companies were based in the South West of the UK, and hence operated in a similar environment. Despite the challenging economic and competitive environment they faced, each remains in operation at the time of writing. To preserve their anonymity, they were accorded pseudonyms: Interlab, Mercury and Kemitech.
5. Overview of the projects, data collection and analysis
The first project (with Interlab) consisted of an upgrade of internal applications of a bespoke Planning Application Database System (PADS) for a UK government agency responsible for developing a world-class community sports system. The second and third projects were both with Kemitech. The second entailed the development of a product which wasconceivedin direct response to ever-growing concerns with respect to traffic management on British road networks, expected to provide real-time information on the state of thetrunkroad network by raisingalarmswhenever traffic conditions breached a user-definedthreshold.The third project concerned the development of a train graph application. This had begun as a bespoke project for a railway company, which had suddenly abandoned the project. The company decided to continue with the development of the application in the hope that it might serve as a potential springboard to showcase the firm’s capabilities to future customersin the railway industry. The final project (with Mercury) concerned software developed for securityagencies. This project (known as ‘Clue Sentinel’) involved embedding modern software technologies within an existing suite of criminal investigation software.
Given the transient nature of vision mobilization (Fransman, 1999), qualitative methods of data collection were considered useful in helping us capture the actors’ lived experiences as well as their inherited knowledge, which were of prime importance in generating insight into their everyday situated activities of mobilising differential visions of other stakeholders. Data for the study were collected over a twelve-month period during 2009-2010 using semi-structured interviews, ethnographical observations and the analysis of archival documents from the various projects. In each case-study company, we interviewed all team members for the specific projects under study, as well as their respective project managers. Interviews were digitally recorded and transcribed. In addition, ethnographical observations, including observations of informal conversations between team members, helped us to gather insight into the everyday situated practices of the innovation teams, capturing and deepening our understanding of ‘unverbalised’ rules and relevant group norms (Silverman, 1993).
[INSERT TABLE 2 HERE]
The data gathered were then triangulated, analysed and interpreted continuously and iteratively until common themes emerged and became saturated (Corbin and Strauss, 2008; Suddaby, 2006). At this stage, the triangulated data were comparatively analysed and reflected upon by drawing on the related literature to see whether they matched correctly with what was heard and seen in the field. It was also an opportunity to identify some recurrent phrases which were ‘analytically converted’ (Strauss, 1978: 30) into relevant themes corresponding to the research questions. Thematic analysis of the data focused on the nature, practices, enablers and inhibitors of vision mobilisation, producing a broad range of segments that were further categorised based on thematic similarities and analytical connections. The identified themes and categories were then indexed to generate analytical categories which helped us to develop some thematic frameworks and concepts to explore viable theoretical explanations. The thematic frameworks were then applied to the entire data-set by annotating them with numerical codes (Strauss and Corbin, 1990), which were also supported with short descriptors elaborating the headings. Indexing here was also about making sense of the gaps between identified themes so as to develop a meaningful, more robust understanding of the data to enable subsequent interpretation and verification of meanings. Systematic and rigorous comparison of the indexed themes with the existing literature enabled us to build up understanding of how the various innovation teams experience the world, together with the identification of logical patterns to produce generalities (Ritchie and Spencer, 1993). The data were then re-arranged under key themes in a matrix. Typologies were generated and causal association between the various themes were made. Emerging patterns from the data were then used to develop greater insight and form descriptive explanations of the mobilisation of stakeholder differential visions in new product development.