Holacratic Engineering Management and Innovation

Innovation in its many forms, disruptive, revolutionary, or evolutionary, is essential for companies to remain competitive in new markets and value networks. While companies apply a variety of traditional engineering management (EM) approaches to create new products, some advocate holacracy, a self-managed and self-engineered organizational structure where each individual creates and develops ideas without regard or conformance to established processes. It is believed that this new holacratic engineering management approach, adding a new process model to the EM body of knowledge, significantly enhances innovation in these socio-technical systems. Using soft systems methodology, multiple linear regression is performed on 18 companies that design, develop, and deliver prepackaged software. This model was created with five component values comprising the holacracy measurements. It was found that companies embracing this new process model have significantly improved innovation performance, although revenue generation did not correlate with the holocratic process.