Generating Stylistic Innovation: A Process Perspective

In contrast to technological innovation, little is known about how innovation arises in the creative industries. This inductive study of product development practices in five fashion firms examines how organizations in the fashion industry develop a particular type of innovation: stylistic innovation. The resulting theoretical framework reveals that successful fashion firms develop stylistic innovations based on a unique combination of three sets of interrelated product development practices—creative sensing (inspiration-based), stylistic orchestrating (coherence-focused) and agile synchronization (timing-driven). This study's main contributions to the innovation literature are its crystallization of the key properties of stylistic product innovation, its development practices and extension of thinking about how these properties are different from prior development practices found in traditional technological industries.