Management innovation is in many ways the missing piece of the innovation puzzle. Management innovation is often needed to make technological innovation work. It is an important driver of competitive advantage, yet it remains poorly understood and scarcely researched.Of course many of us are familiar with hallmarks of management innovation, like the introduction of industrial research labs by healthcare company Bayer and General Electric in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the divisional form of organising developed at General Motors in the 1920s, and more recently activity-based costing at General Motors and industrial equipment manufacturer John Deere.
But what do we know about the processes through which these management innovations came into being? What caused the individuals behind these successful innovations to try something new? And what were the consequences for the individual innovators and the firms for which they worked?
The beginnings of answers to these questions is in an EBF article.
Related post: Hamel on management innovation
