Connections between Types of Innovation, Types of Organizational Change and Levels of Learning: A Study of Chinese Organizations
Innovation is defined as the general organizational processes and procedures for generating, considering, and acting on novel and useful insights leading to significant organizational improvements in terms of improved or new business products, services, or internal processes. This paper is an attempt to explore the links between the types of innovation, the types of organizational change and levels of learning based on a study of 160 Chinese organizations. The authors provide the classification of innovation, organizational change and learning as the theoretical framework. The three types of innovation are technical innovation, administrative innovation and ancillary innovation. The organizational change could be also divided into three types: developmental, transitional and transformational. Learning can be grouped as single-loop, double-loop and triple-loop. The research is based on interviews conducted with 160 managers from different organizations covering different industries. On the basis of survey results, the authors find out there are close connections between the three aspects: innovation type, change type and learning type. First of all, the findings revealed that in almost half of the organizations administrative innovation took place while an almost equal number - a quarter, of the companies experienced technical and ancillary innovation respectively. Regarding the types of change, a fairly large percentage of companies underwent transformational change, deepest by scope while only 5％ of companies witnessed developmental change. In the companies undergoing the technical innovation, three quarters of them experienced transitional change while 16％ and 8％ respectively saw developmental and transformational change. However, in the companies where technical innovation took place, the level of learning remained at the first level - single-loop. In the companies which experienced administrative innovation, developmental change rarely took place whereas mostly triple-loop learning took place. Considering the companies where the deepest innovation - ancillary innovation happened, 90％ of them experienced the deepest change - transformational and the deepest level of learning - triple-loop.To sum up, there is a direct link between the types of innovation and learning in lower level. However, in the companies which experienced administrative innovation and ancillary innovation, the rate of occurrence of triple-loop learning is almost the same. Moreover, there is not necessarily corresponding relation between the types of innovation and change. Despite the fact that the highest level of innovation is accompanied by deepest change, the lowest level of innovation may not be necessarily accompanied by lower level change, i.e. deepest scope of change may take place even if lowest level of innovation happens in a Chinese organization.
Ruth ALAS Wei SUN
Estonian Business School Lauteri 3, Tallinn, Estonia, 10114
国际会议
The Fifth InternationalSymposium on Management of Technology(ISMOT07)(第五届技术与创新管理国际研讨会)
杭州
英文
580-584
2007-06-01（万方平台首次上网日期，不代表论文的发表时间）