Summary Popular parlance suggests that 'you learn more from your failures than from your successes'. However, when it comes to failed innovations in organizations, we find that the proverb is not always true. We suggest that instead, failure may often lead to innovation trauma, an inability to...

This article aims to reconcile the seemingly contradicting arguments put forth in different literatures regarding the role of financial resource constraints as inhibitors or enablers of innovation in organizations. Recognizing that innovative endeavors are regularly carried out through team...

Ours is an argument for ideas that become us. Illustratory is a statement by a well-known management author who lamented the difficulty of “escaping one’s past ideas”. Viewing himself a prisoner, his past published ideas had devoured him: they limited his ability to imagine or credibly...

This is a real story about how a group of highly innovative and highly committed employees sought to rescue a failing telecom giant while they thought AT&T still had its chance. The signs of radical change in the telecom industry were in the air. The management did not seem to be able to come to...

Rigidity has been described as a major contributor to both organizational failure and survival. In this essay, we seek to clarify the position of rigidity in organizational adaptation by making some conjectures about exploratory patience, organizational failure, and the nature of learning for...

Industrial markets are frequently characterized by an oligopolistic market structure. As a result, suppliers may become highly selective with respect to decisions that involve collaborating with certain customers. Buying firms must therefore be more attractive than their rivals to obtain...

Corporations are beginning to realize that the proverbial 'if we only knew what we know' also includes 'if we only knew what our customers know.' The authors discuss the concept of Customer Knowledge Management (CKM), which refers to the management of knowledge from customers, i.e. knowledge...

This paper revisits Roos and Victor's (1999) conceptual framework for strategy making, involving descriptive, creative, and challenging imagination in the light of empirical evidence. The three imaginations are linked to concrete strategy-making processes as illustrated with a longitudinal case...

In this paper, we address the pre-project phase of idea generation in the product innovation process, where the effective generation of new product ideas still remains an issue of high relevance for both management scholars and practitioners. We relate Nonaka and colleagues' four knowledge...