The impact of the organizational implementation of innovation management on reducing uncertainty in innovation

Most, if not all, successful firms have profitably turned new knowledge into new products or services that customers want. The use of new knowledge, both technological and market knowledge, for offering a new product or service that a customer is willing to pay for is called innovation. It seems that in today’s global and hypercompetitive market environment, innovation is the engine for new product performance and, ultimately, success, growth and survival. But innovations do not come easy. In times of rapid changes and heightened uncertainty, prevailing in today’s economy, firms must find ways to increase the organization’s ability to continuously acquire the necessary knowledge and, what is of major importance, to see uncertainty as a opportunity for new business. For Galbraith 1 , uncertainty means “the difference between the amount of information required to perform the task and the amount of information already possessed by the organization”. Following this notion also implies that increasing the available amount of information can reduce uncertainty, as it is seen as a gap in knowledge.2 Various sources of uncertainty in innovation projects have been identified and discussed by contingency theorists or other scholars in the fields of organizational behaviour or innovation management but only little attention has been paid on the impact of different types and levels of uncertainty on innovation. Most of them concentrate on how to organize and manage innovation projects under uncertainty in general, lacking differentiation. Literature provides only little empirical knowledge about the impact of the organizational implementation of innovation management on reducing uncertainty in innovation with respect to the level of uncertainty. The objective of this work, therefore is the identification of the factors and issues that affect the management of innovation within organizations depending on the level of uncertainty. Furthermore, a new conceptual framework will be developed which can act as a guideline on how to implement innovation management in an organization in order to reduce two major dimensions of uncertainty, which are market and technology. In this thesis this shall be the leading theme, which is also reflected in the research question.