Communicating Ideas Purposefully - toward a Design Theory of Innovation Artifacts

Fostering innovation is an essential task for companies, particularly in the dynamic and constantly changing software industry. Whereas it is widely acknowledged that the innovative capacity of a company depends crucially on how well it supports employees in realizing ideas, there is a lack of explicit, practitioner-oriented guidance on how these can communicate their ideas purposefully. We contribute to this field with an exploratory field study, in which we interviewed 32 experienced innovators at a major Swiss banking software provider, and collected objects through which they communicated ideas. We analyzed the collected data applying three types of causal analysis – creative causation, active causation, and passive causation. The outcome of this research is a nascent design theory that provides structured prescriptions on how to communicate ideas through what we term " innovation artifacts ". In brief terms, our study shows that innovation artifacts should enable innovators to persuade and collaborate with relevant stakeholders. 1 Introduction A company's strategic position in a competitive market depends crucially on its innovative capacity (Tidd and Bessant 2011). Therefore, fostering innovation is an essential task, particularly in the dynamic software industry (Fitzgerald et al. 2008). The continuous acceleration of innovation rates forces ever more established companies to fundamentally rethink their understanding of innovation In this context, a larger share of existing studies focuses mainly on establishing processes and organizational structures that facilitate innovations. According to the open innovation paradigm, companies should purposefully use both inflows and outflows of knowledge to accelerate internal innovation and expand the market for external innovation (Chesbrough et al. 2005). Similarly, the intrapreneurship paradigm describes a shift from traditionally centralized, R&D oriented organizational structures to network-based work structures (Desouza 2011). This view regards current