Community, Population, and Organization Effects on Innovation: A Multilevel Perspective.

Two distinct themes emerge from the Special Research Forum on Innovation and Organizations. One group of articles develops an expanded view of the influence of context on organizations' ability to innovate. Together, the articles offer a complex multilevel view of context as including elements ranging from the dominant strategy of an organization to the social-psychological antecedents of creativity. A second group of articles provides a community and population perspective on the diffusion of innovations. We suggest the possibility of a union between the context and industry dynamics approaches. As we contemplated editing this Special Research Forum on Innovation and Organizations, we observed that a plethora of books on innovation had been written in recent years. Our collections had grown dramatically during the 1990s as the topic took on increasing practical and theoretical significance. This vibrant literature covered topics and concepts ranging from paradigm shifts, through intrapreneurship, intelligent organizations, mastering change, and time-based competition. Most of these works were in good currency, enjoying unparalleled popularity among managers and enviable citation rates among scholars. Surely such a wealth of information signaled the arrival of a dominant theoretical model of innovation in organizations. Whereas each book and article made its own valuable contribution, we were disappointed to discover that no dominant theoretical perspective had emerged to integrate the multiple streams of innovation research. Unlike other evolving fields of organizational inquiry, such as organizational economics, contingency theory, organizational ecology, and institutional theory, innovation research demonstrates little in the way of common theoretical underpinnings to guide its development. Although these other approaches are not free from internal debate, each has at its core conceptual principles and advocates that drive its theoretical and empirical development.