Crossing the Design–Use Divide: How Organizations Select Innovations to Adopt

Prior scholarship on technology and organizations has focused either on how innovations are designed or how they are used, often assuming that successful selection stems from successful design. But this assumption has limited our understanding of patterns of resistance and advocacy that can influence how and whether innovations reach organizations in the first place. To explore these patterns, this study asks, how does selection unfold within organizations, and what are the consequences of this process for the design and use of innovations? Drawing on a two-year ethnographic study, I examine how entrepreneurs piloted their AI-based innovations with potential adopting organizations. Rather than testing for learning or generalizability, organizations set up committees that engaged in process manipulation by narrowing the scope of pilots, controlling conversations, assigning pilot responsibility, and using goal claiming to align pilot outcomes with committees’ majority preferences. Committees with more adversarial members designed pilots that tested advanced aspects of entrepreneurs’ innovations, hoping for failure. Committees with a majority that championed the innovations tested basic aspects, ensuring success. While pilots run by champions mostly succeeded, these innovations faced more resistance later, during implementation, than did innovations piloted successfully by adversaries. This study shows that innovation is endogenous to selection, and reveals that champions can temper innovation, while adversaries can enable it.