Innovation Management – “Diving into the deep”

My research started to take shape after reading hundreds of articles. One of the things that has been a distinctive part of my journey in the doctoral program is that I have learnt to move into the realm of critical thinking. This is what fundamentally differentiates a doctoral student from a masters student - you learn how to utilize critical thinking skills.

Having the critical thinking aspect upper most in mind, I kept thinking about all that I read and re-read in the literature related to disruptive innovation, radical innovation and incremental innovation. Then I started asking myself the pivotal question, again and again, so what?

On my journey into the research, I noticed that very little was examined or researched from the team vantage point. Most of the research I found centered around organizations and leaders. As a project management professional, I certainly understood the value of teams and what high performing teams could accomplish from a practitioner point of view but did the research data corroborate the existing knowledge? Why is understanding this important to the research topic?

It was imperative by this part into the journey to start formulating the research question. I used the PICOC (Population, Intervention, Comparison, Outcome and Context, and CIMO (Context, Intervention, Mechanisms and Outcomes) methods to decide what research question was needed to address the problem noted in my first blog. The PICOC and CIMO are critical to formulating the research question in evidence-based management research (Barends & Rousseau, 2018; Denyer. & Tranfield, 2009). The PICOC method helps to identify the population being researched and the CIMO method helps to flush out the mechanisms associated with the research. The research data being explored would play a large role in determining the mechanism which would play a crucial role in determining the trajectory of my research for my Manuscript.

After much deliberation, I made the determination based on the evidence that I had already explored that dynamic capability (mechanism) of teams in high technology industries (narrowed down to pharm biotech after recommendations) was the main framework to build my research. This is where my research mushroomed to another level of complexity. I added “dynamic capability” as a search criterion to understand what was already researched in the area of radical innovation and incremental innovation. The addition of dynamic capability as a mechanism or framework to build my Manuscript radically changed my research efforts. It catapulted me into an area which caused great excitement. My research expanded substantially with the volume of literature available and tied in nicely with the amount of research associated with innovation management. But again, the gap was evident.

Dynamic capability has several meanings in the management arena but one of the most popular is by Teece, a renowned scholar and author of hundreds of research articles on the topic. Teece (2007) defined dynamic capability as “sensing, seizing and managing threats”. This seemed like a perfect fit to analyze the issues associated with my research problem identified in my first blog.

In the meantime, I was seeking advice over the summer from a professor at my institution (University of Maryland Global Campus), when I mentioned that I wanted to use dynamic capability as mechanism for my research. It was recommended that I should read Dora (2015) which was a literature review of 10 years of dynamic capability literature. The article by Dora helped to solidify the choice of dynamic capability to understand the constructs which influence teams in the pharmaceutical biotechnology arena.

I subsequently started to think of what theory could underpin my research because during my research for the Manuscript I had come across several theories: Stakeholder theory, Absorptive Capacity theory and Innovation Theory. One of the most popular theories being researched was Absorptive Capacity theory. However, because I was looking at teams, I wanted to look at behavior, so I started exploring Social Cognitive Theory. I added this to my search criterion and again my research expanded even further.

In parallel to the activity of figuring out the theory I would utilize for the research study, I wanted to research what Christensen had written on the topic. I was introduced to Christensen early in my doctoral journal as an innovation expert and the fact that Christensen had produced groundbreaking work of great reputation in the change management world, it was imperative for me to analyze his work and see the connection to my research. I therefore ended up buying the book “The Innovator’s Dilemma” by Clayton Christensen to add to my library. This book played a critical and crucial role in my journey at this stage. It lent credibility to my early discoveries around the gap in the literature. Christensen confirmed that “heavy weight teams” are critical to innovation. Keep this in mind because I will go deeper with this observation in my next blog.

At this point with all this research behind me I started to formulate a research question. The research question centered around the effects of dynamic capability on ambidextrous innovation teams in the pharma biotech industry. I also wanted to understand the constructs which would help to drive innovation and sustain innovation.

For my next blog I will dive into the constructs that were utilized for the rest of my research. These constructs will take us to the long-awaited findings. I will also discuss which theory I ultimately applied to support my study.