CONTINGENT ORGANISING FOR GAMES OF INNOVATION: DIVERSE CONFIGURATIONS OF CORE PRINCIPLES FOR INNOVATIVE ORGANISATIONAL DESIGN

This paper leverages current thinking on organising for innovation to create new ideas on contingent organising for innovation. I argue that all successfully innovative organisations need to be built on the same higher-level principles of innovative organising, but the relative emphasis on which principles and how they are implemented will vary by game of innovation. I focus on four organising activities: defining the work that will be done, differentiating that work into coherent units, integrating those differentiated units, and controlling the whole system over time. I synthesise the literature into four principles of innovative organising: defining innovative work as professional practice; differentiating innovative work into domains of practice; integrating these domains via strategic sensemaking, and controlling the work with social rules. Finally, particular configurations of these principles are developed for various MINE games of innovation, based on the dynamics of each game.