Organizational Innovativeness: Product Variation and Reorientation

This paper summarizes the results of a larger study of innovativeness in product development (Normann, 1969). The objective of this study was to gain some understanding of how organizational structure influences innovativeness. The original study consisted of 13 case studies of product-development projects in 12 moderately large to large Swedish companies from various industries, such as food processing, packaging, pharmaceuticals, construction, electronics, and engineering. Two objectives guided the collection of data: (1) as accurate and complete a description as possible of the actual processes in product development; and (2) a description of the organizational context, including data on the formal organization, the communication system, the external environment, and so on. Respondents were encouraged to speak freely and to give their own perceptions of what had happened; however, an attempt was made to obtain data on various ideas suggested as important by current theory, particularly the approaches of March and Simon (1958) and Burns and Stalker (1961). Data were collected from documents and by long, unstructured interviews with top managers, including the company leaders and managers who had been actively participating in the project. All interviews were taped and typewritten. The material was then content analyzed in several stages. A comprehensive report on the data and the methodology guiding the analysis, as well as some initial theoretical development, can be found in Normann (1969). GENERAL CONCEPTS