Lima traffic is internationally competitive. While stuck in it last week my colleague explained that both Chile and Peru take credit for inventing the deliciously tart cocktail called the Pisco Sour. Her story reminded me that we should not be exceedingly confident in our "knowledge" about the origins of most things.
A few scholars have tried to identify the sources of significant management innovations, such as the balanced scorecard, total quality management, reengineering, and the like. By and large they conclude that these innovations have not usually originated with academics or published scholarly research. Their conclusions have ocassionally been cited to criticize business schools for being too “ivory tower.”
There are at least two problems with these types of studies. First, they are likely to be wrong about the creative roots of innovations. The uncomfortable truth is that we’ll never know with certainty what sparked an idea. Even if an idea was not introduced in an academic journal, perhaps it first came up in a lively classroom discussion. Or maybe somebody strung together a series of theoretical ideas and furnished it with a clever name for practice. Management insights are not born in and traceable to a Petri dish, they are a blend of ideas that can have several inspirations and come in many variations. Moreover, new ideas are shaped by and for specific organizations as they are implemented. Management innovation is a function of accumulated knowledge not a single idea.
Second, the studies send the wrong message about the purpose of research in business schools. Remarkably few productive scholarly insights become “significant” management innovations. And most useful innovations in management are not radical departures from existing processes. They are, as the Economist puts it, of the “Earl of Sandwich variety: bread and meat had both been around long before the earl put meat between two slices of bread so that he could eat while gambling.” Accordingly, incremental contributions to our understanding of management can be helpful to improve practice and there can be enormous value in the type of business school research that tests, codifies, synthesizes, and diffuses ideas.
This does not mean we should surrender our quest for blockbuster ideas or otherwise constain what business schools do to foster more management innovation. Quite the opposite; to fully appreciate and invest in management innovation, we must expand our view of intellectual capital and recognize that it is created through deep engagement with management practice and meaningful interaction with students, as well as through academic research published in top peer-reviewed journals.