How innovators reframe resources in the strategy‐making process to gain innovation adoption

• Author: Barbara S. Lawrence,Rangapriya (Priya) Kannan‐Narasimhan
• Date: 01 March 2018
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/smj.2748
• Published date: 01 March 2018

SPECIAL ISSUE ARTICLE

How innovators reframe resources in the strategy-

making process to gain innovation adoption

Rangapriya (Priya) Kannan-Narasimhan

1

| Barbara S. Lawrence

2

1

School of Business Administration, University of

San Diego, San Diego, California

2

Anderson School of Management, University of

California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, California

Correspondence

Rangapriya Kannan-Narasimhan, Olin Hall, 5998

Alcala Park, San Diego, CA 92110.

Email: priya@sandiego.edu

Funding information

UCLA Anderson School of Management’s Price

Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation

Research Summary: This multicompany qualitative field

study combines strategy process and strategy-as-practice

perspectives to show how innovators successfully gain

adoption for their autonomous innovations by reframing

the meaning and potential of the associated internal

resources to create fit with their organization’s strategy.

Mapping the five steps involved in the resource reframing

process onto the different parts of the Bower-Burgelman

process model of strategic change shows that innovators

can shape the strategic context for their autonomous inno-

vations before external market validation is available.

These findings confirm the unique potential and impor-

tance of different forms of discourse in shaping the strate-

gic innovation process.

Managerial Summary: How do innovators from lower

levels of an organization gain approval for their innova-

tions especially when their ideas do not readily fit their

organization’s strategy? To explore this question, we con-

ducted 138 interviews with innovators and their decision

makers in 14 firms based in Silicon Valley. We find that

successful innovators shape a story supporting their inno-

vation by rethinking their firm’s current and potential

resources. They then use this story to convince decision

makers that their innovation creates unique competitive

advantage. Contrary to conventional wisdom, decision

makers approved such innovations even without external

validation, solely based on the innovators’success in

depicting their reorganization of the firm’s resources.

KEYWORDS

autonomous innovations, convincing decision makers,

framing resources, resourcing, strategy as practice

Received: 12 June 2015 Revised: 14 June 2017 Accepted: 21 June 2017 Published on: 10 January 2018

DOI: 10.1002/smj.2748

720 Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/smj Strat Mgmt J. 2018;39:720–758.

1|INTRODUCTION

Organizational decision makers traditionally desire innovative products but, at the same time, resist

autonomous innovations. This paradox is not surprising. Autonomous innovations—innovations that

propose new categories of products and solutions—by definition are ill-fitting and challenge the

organization’s concept of strategy, that is, the way in which it currently creates unique value for its

customers (Burgelman, 1983a; Dougherty & Heller, 1994; van Dijk, Berends, Jelinek, Romme, &

Weggeman, 2011). This study explores how innovators successfully gain adoption for nascent

autonomous innovations. Success is defined by whether or not such ill-fitting innovations are

adopted by the decision makers in organizations they originate in, regardless of their future commer-

cial success. Our phenomenon of interest is adoption of autonomous innovations by decision

makers. The adoption process will be understood by exploring how innovators frame their autono-

mous innovations by re-conceptualizing their organizational resources, thus gaining internal support

from decision makers. As a result of this process, decision makers transform their corporate strategy

to adopt the innovation, independent of and prior to external market validation.

Decision makers signal support for proposed innovations by allocating resources to absorb them

into the organization (Cohen & Levinthal, 1990; Meyer & Goes, 1988; Reid & Brentani, 2004).

These resources include technological resources, such as manufacturing facilities, equipment, and

engineering know-how, and customer resources, such as knowledge of customer needs, sales chan-

nels, and brand reputation (Danneels, 2002). Less immediately relevant to nascent innovations are

other resources, such as organizational structures, planning and control systems, and geographic

location (Barney, 1991).

One of the seminal frameworks that explains how innovators successfully gain formal adoption

for autonomous innovations is Bower and Burgelman’s process model of strategy (B-B model)

(Bower, 1970; Burgelman, 1983a, 1983c; Noda & Bower, 1996). The B-B model states that innova-

tors navigate autonomous innovations through two sequential processes: core and overlaying. Key

core process activities include defining the innovation and impetus, which is characterized by

resource mobilization activities (see Figure 1). Overlaying processes, on the other hand, involve

convincing decision makers to expand the organization’s strategy to include the innovation.

1

The

central undertaking during this latter stage is strategic context determination. The B-B model sug-

gests that, if they are to achieve successful adoption, innovators must link the core and overlaying

processes by negotiating the connection between resource mobilization and strategic context deter-

mination. However, subsequent research on how innovators gain adoption typically focuses on

either resource mobilization activities or strategic context determination activities, and hence we

know little about the link between the two.

Studies that focus on resource mobilization activities address how innovators scavenge, bootleg,

and pilfer resources to demonstrate their innovation’s feasibility to decision makers

(e.g., Burgelman, 1983b; Jelinek & Schoonhoven, 1990; Kannan-Narasimhan, 2014). For example,

in Burgelman’s (1983b) study innovators mobilized their organization’s resources to demonstrate

their innovation’s (ANA’s) market feasibility through bootstrapping. Innovators built their own ser-

vice group in the test marketing phase with 20–25 installations because the decision makers were

unsure about their organization’s marketing capability and there was a lot of resistance from them.

However, the focus of the study was not exploring how successful resource mobilization by

1

The B-B model also discusses structural context determination as a part of the overlaying process. However, this activity is carried

out by decision-makers rather than innovators. The focus of our study is the practices innovators use to make explicit links between

their organization’s requisite resources and its strategy. We therefore do not discuss activities of decision-makers in this study.

KANNAN-NARASIMHAN AND LAWRENCE 721

innovators compelled decision makers to incorporate the innovation into their organization’s strat-

egy. By contrast, studies that focus on strategic context determination activities suggest that success-

ful innovators conform to or reframe their organization’s strategy, structure, identity, and so on

(Dougherty & Heller, 1994; van Dijk et al., 2011). In van Dijk et al.’s study (van Dijk et al., 2011),

decision makers opposed a diagnostic technology innovation they saw as irrelevant to their firm’s

imaging strategy until innovators convinced them that the innovation “belonged”by reframing

it. The study thus identified how innovators addressed decision makers’concerns about strategic fit,

but did not explain how innovators linked their organization’s resource base to its strategy.

One of the central reasons that researchers fail to make the connection between the B-B model’s

resource mobilization and strategic context determination stages is because this model typically

treats organizational resources as having innate properties and predetermined applications. For

example Burgelman (1983b) shows how innovators mobilized old pumps for their SURF innova-

tion. However, the innovators still used old pumps as pumps instead of changing their potential use.

FIGURE 1 Bower-Burgelman framework original model. *Bolded statements refer to key activities from Bower-

Burgelman’s (1983b) original model that we use in this study

FIGURE 2 Resourcing and framing steps for gaining innovation adoption through the lens of the Bower-Burgelman

framework

722 KANNAN-NARASIMHAN AND LAWRENCE