Pisano - CREATIVE CONSTRUCTION: the dna of sustained innovation

Larger enterprises are rarely viewed as fountains of innovation. Over the past several decades, a barrage of writings, news stories, and lectures has conditioned us to accept as a law that scale stifles innovation. As enterprises grow, the narrative goes, they inevitably suffer organizational sclerosis and become feeble shadows of their once-dominant former selves. They are helpless in the wake of disruptive innovation attacks by nimble, entrepreneurial firms. It is a depressing story that, unfortunately, has unfolded many times. And yet it does not have to be this way.

Creative Construction challenges the dogma that, as enterprises grow, they inevitably lose their capacity for transformative innovation. Over my thirty-year career, I have worked with companies across the full-size spectrumfrom the tiniest start-ups to the largest corporations on the planet. Sure enough, I have seen many large enterprises whose inertia, bureaucracy, myopia, and culture left them too paralyzed to undertake anything but the most incremental innovation. Even when they tried to rejuvenate themselves through some type of innovation initiative, I saw more failures than successes. These cases seemed to confirm the prevailing hypothesis that large scale and innovation dont mix. As I peered further, however, I began to realize that the root cause of such malaise and the reason so many innovation initiatives fail have more to do with management practice and leadership than with organizational scale per se. Yes, organizational size complicates innovation and can make it hard to sustain or renew innovation capabilities. But, the more I looked (and the more I compared experiences with small start-ups), the more I believed that scale if properly exploited could actually be an advantage, not a liability, for innovation.

The hypothesis that larger enterprises can become highly innovative started me on a decade-long journey of research, case writing, and consulting to better understand which management practices enable companies to sustain their innovative capabilities even as they grow quite large.

I also dug deeply into decades of academic literature on the drivers of innovation performance. My research and experience along with the work of other scholars led me to conclude that company growth and size do not need to spell the end of an organizations innovative days. Innovative performance is rooted in a combination of strategy, organizational systems, and culture, all of which are shaped by leadership. Creative Construction explores how leaders of both growing and large established enterprises can develop strategies, design systems, and build cultures required for sustained innovation performance.

Many management books promise simple solutions to complex problems. Unfortunately, at least when it comes to innovation, I do not believe such a recipe or formula exists. Innovation is hard. It is not only hard to come up with a commercially successful innovation, but it is even harder to build an organization capable of creating such innovations time and again. There is no magic elixir or single best model for building a durably innovative enterprise. Different enterprises have followed different approaches. Thus, I offer no simple blueprints for instant innovation success. Instead, I wrote Creative Construction for thoughtful practitioners seeking well-grounded principles and frameworks that can help them find the paths that work best for their organizations. Innovation is and always will be a difficult journey. My hope is that this book inspires and prepares you to lead this journey.

Although I have spent my entire career as an academic at the Harvard Business School, I have also engaged heavily in the world of practice as a consultant, as a company cofounder, and as a board member of several enterprises. Having my feet in the worlds of both practice and academia has shaped how I see the problems explored in this book. I have written Creative Construction to bridge these two worlds. While drawing from my own and others scholarly research on innovation (references are provided in the endnotes for the interested reader), I have tried to write in an accessible style. My hope was to create a book that has the expected rigor of scholarly work without its typical mortis.

A project like this would not have been possible without the help and support of many different organizations and individuals. I am grateful for the generous financial support provided by the Harvard Business School to pursue the research underpinning this book. Many of the examples used in the book are from case studies I wrote thanks to the funding of the Harvard Business School. These examples are acknowledged in the references.

In addition to academic research and case writing, my work has benefitted from extensive consulting experience with a broad range of companies throughout the world and across many industries, including the pharmaceutical and life sciences industry, specialty chemicals, medical devices, manufacturing, financial services, consumer products, electronics, and telecommunications. Such experience has exposed me to the real challenges faced by practitioners operating in complex organizations. Through my consulting, I have been better able to understand how hypothesized solutions to problems actually work in practice. The feedback I received from numerous clients has been enormously valuable to me. In various parts of this book, I use examples drawn from my consulting experience. Where those examples may contain proprietary or sensitive information, I do not name the companies unless I have received explicit permission from the individuals and companies involved.