Innovation in Business Organizations: Some Factors Associated with Success or Failure of Staff Proposals

FoRM:AL organizations, regardless of type, are confronted with a variety of recurrent system problems. Among these system problems are recruitment of personnel, allocation of personnel to various functions, definition and redefinition of goals, decisions regarding succession of personnel to the system of statuses in the organization, etc.' A system problem that cuts across all other system problems of an organization is that of adapting the organization to a changing environment. This invariably entails the development of new ideas or procedures. The implementation of new procedures or ideas, whether a product of invention or discovery, will be referred to in this paper as innovation. In the extensive literature on diffusion of new ideas in agriculture or in other contexts, the social unit most frequently investigated has been a community.2 With the exception of the distinguished researches of Mansfield,3 little attention has been paid to the diffusion of ideas in the context of an organization. Although the innovation process, as just defined, is a generic phenomenon in organizations, it is probably more commonly observable in a business organization where the environment is a compelling force for adaptation of the organization to new developments. The importance of this process has led to specialization of the function of developing and implementing new ideas. In business organizations, probably more than in any other type of organization, are found staff specialists whose principal function is to develop new ideas or to increase the adaptability of the organization to its environment. As organizations increase in size and technological complexity, the role of staff units probably becomes more pervasive. Past studies on the relation of staff to line emphasize the typical problems that arise in the relationship between these two categories of personnel in business organizations.4 More recently, the theoretical analyses by Churchman and Schainblatt and others have high* The authors are indebted to David Edwards for his assistance in processing the data for this