Conditions affecting innovation : a systematic review of innovation and a case study of a South African company

[摘要] ENGLISH SUMMARY : Conventional wisdom holds that innovation depends on management providing an enabling context rather than on management prescription and control. Accordingly, much of the literature on innovation management aims to identity various configurations of enabling conditions that are favourable for innovation to occur. However, this literature is subject to twoforms of proliferation. Firstly, the list of enabling conditions grows longer and longer, impacting its usefulness. Secondly, various kinds of innovation (product/process, radical/incremental innovation) are distinguished andeach demands a custom configuration of enabling conditions. The thesis attempts to resist this proliferation in attempting to distill a superset of conditions from the literature. To this end, a systematicliterature review is done on various identified enabling conditions andfactors in both incremental and radical innovation case studies. Thereaftereight super-conditions are created from the various conditions and factorsin the innovation literature. These eight conditions are then subjected to avalidation against top journals and it is shown that six of these conditionsare relevant for radical innovation. Since there is a danger that the derived at super-factors can become too abstract to be useful, the second part of the thesis seeks to apply the final six super-factors to a well-known published innovation business case study of Discovery Health --- an organisation where different kinds of innovation took place (product and process as well as radical andincremental innovations). It was found that in the case study of Discoverythree of the super-conditions could be identified, namely: leadership, strategy, and value system. For the remaining three super-conditions no clear support could be found in this particular case study.It is concluded that at least three conditions address an enabling contextfor innovation, both from literature and in an identifiable way in a concretecase of an innovating organisation.

[发布机构] Stellenbosch University