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Aesthetics of business innovation: Experiencing 'internal process' versus 'external jolts'

Rafael Ramirez
Professor, HEC-Paris and Fellow at Templeton College, University of Oxford, United Kingdom

Niklas Arvidsson
Postdoctoral Fellow, National Institute for Working Life, Stockholm, Sweden

Abstract

Our paper outlines and discusses an unexplored characteristic that affects how firms chose to manage their business innovation efforts - the way executives feel about, and sense their challenges and experience. We found two distinct forms of how managers do business innovation through our interviewing managers, through reviewing the studies made by others, and in studying actual innovation actions. We propose that an important factor determining the choice made by executives of a given model of innovation depends on how they personally feel about the experience they have had, and how they sense the potential, of each alternative. Aesthetics - the part of philosophy that studies how we appreciate experiences we call 'appealing' or 'ugly' - provides a framework to analyze these feelings. Our study complements other studies arguing that aesthetic distinctions precede, and often frame, what would otherwise appear to be rational selection.

We provide in-depth descriptions of how two forms of innovation that we respectively call 'internal process' and 'external-jolt' function and are experienced. We did not set out to study the aesthetics of innovation - the distinction and what governs it appeared in the course of our carrying out contract research on business innovation. So this paper is something of a 'by-product' of that research, which is not reported in detail here.

It was particularly in the course of carrying out interviews with executives that our research made us realize that an innovation is very often experienced -and evaluated- aesthetically. A mode of innovation is felt and made sense of in terms that aesthetics clarifes: solutions are found to be 'elegant', or 'fitting' the culture. We interpreted that this suggests that in actual practice, the choice of mode of innovation involves not only 'rational' criteria, but also intuition, gut feeling, and sense by the managers involved. With the help of aesthetics, we render two forms of innovation explicit in archetypes or 'ideal types' in Max Weber's sense. These provide referents for managers to examine not only how they experience/feel/make sense of an innovation, but also to better determine the consequences these feelings hold for the type of innovation they will enact.

The internal-process innovation aesthetic is often manifested as a well-oiled internally managed mechanism that screens and supports ideas, typically in a process depicted as a 'funnel'. The funnel brings in, selects, and supports ideas that become projects, prototypes, and eventually actual new businesses.

The external-jolt innovation aesthetic assumes existing organizations sooner or later become dormant and need an external jolt to wake up and re-vitalize them. In this aesthetic, innovation is depicted as an external event that, if successful, 'kicks' a sustainable business cycle into motion. The view is that an inventor 'hits upon' an idea, by invention or discovery, and alone or with others develops a business model that makes that invention sustainable.

By describing and outlining two alternative ideal types or archetypes of innovation based on aesthetic distinctions, we hope to provide two different results. First, we aim for academics to re-think how innovation actually works. Second, we hope managers will become more attentive as to 'what feels right' to them and the consequences of acting out those feelings.

Feelings in the internal process aesthetic

Positive/developmental feelings can include:

• Satisfaction at seeing a well designed, smooth running machine, gather, evaluate, and support actual innovations in a fair and professional way
• Pride in getting 'the best out of the people we already have'
• Excitement at having the entrepreneurial spirit alive in a bureaucracy
• Confidence stemming from securing inter-functional or inter-departmental collaboration that is otherwise rare
• Confidence in being able to innovate enough to satisfy survival and even growth conditions in the future
• The 'buzz' that comes with intellectual curiosity working effectively
• Internally generated internal and external recognition

Negative/regressive feelings (that if strong can push one to favour the external-jolt aesthetic) can include:

• Arrogance - no one does this better than we do
• Overconfidence in own people
• Blindness to what is being done outside
• Lack of interest in 'other ways' and 'other fields', and - generally - 'others'
• Burnout - doing too much internally
• Groupthink - too little external challenge
• Smugness - we are OK, thank you very much
• Cynicism - no one has tried this before, why should we?
• Dissociation/ splitting: we innovators are far more exciting/ superior than those operational people over there

Feeling in the external jolt aesthetic

Positive/developmental feelings can include:

• Excitement in meeting counterparts with whom conversation 'sparks' and is mutually enriching (Zeldin 1998)
• Satisfaction at seeing a external ideas captured, adopted, and adapted into new products
• Pride in getting 'the best people the world offers to work with us', in being the 'preferred' partner
• Personal development through challenging own assumptions, or widening one's world by discovering the worlds of others
• The confidence that securing inter-organizational collaborations (alliances, joint ventures, consortia) that are otherwise rare affords
• Serenity in being able to innovate enough to satisfy survival and even growth conditions in the future
• The 'buzz' that comes with intellectual curiosity working effectively
• Co-generated internal and external recognition

Negative/regressive feelings (that if strong can push one to favour the internal-process aesthetic) can include:

• Arrogance - our counterparts are not as good at this as we thought they were
• Insecurity - our people are not as good at this as we think our counterparts thought they were
• Blindness to what is already being done by insiders not mobilised to interact with the outside world
• Feeling over-stretched in trying to cover too many fields/ subjects/ countries/ conferences, which may lead to burn out
• Exceeding one's absorptive capacity - failure to link external learning to implementable action
• NIMBY - 'this could be tried out, but 'not in my back yard''
• Cynicism - my best people are being stolen away into these new, peripheral, external activities - why support them?
• Dissociation/ splitting: the outsiders are more interesting than the insiders
• Fatigue after all that travelling

The managerial implications of each aesthetic are outlined in table 6 ...continues...

Keywords

business aesthetics, internal-process innovation aesthetic, external-jolt innovation aesthetic, organisational fit, managing innovation, 'what feels right', sustainable business cycle, Shell's Gamechanger, case study, management implications

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