Barriers to radical process innovation: a case of environmental technology in the oil industry

Autor: Oleksiy Osiyevskyy, Amir Bahman Radnejad, Harrie Vredenburg
Rok vydání: 2020
Předmět:
Zdroj: Journal of Strategy and Management. 13:453-476
ISSN: 1755-425X
DOI: 10.1108/jsma-11-2019-0206
Popis: PurposeWhile a radical innovation can be embedded in new products or new processes, most studies to date have concentrated on barriers to radical product innovations, with little insights available about the challenges for implementation of radical process innovations.Design/methodology/approachWe theorize a set of barriers to radical process innovation based on a critical case study of an oil company. Our study employs data from 14 semi-structured interviews, one complete participant-observer in the process and access to all corporate documentation. The organization being studied was eventually unable to bring the new process technology to commercialization despite the technology having both technical feasibility and substantive cost savings potential.FindingsWe identify five groups of challenges that the company faced: (1) challenges in resource mobilization, (2) challenges in piloting strategy, (3) innovation leadership tensions, (4) tensions in managing shareholders' expectations and (5) product-process innovation tension (i.e. a unique situation when a company implementing a radical process innovation and simultaneously pursues the path to commercialize it as a product innovation).Practical implicationsSustainable development is one of the major challenges in our era. Process innovations are crucial for achieving sustainability without changing the final product. By providing a list of challenges that executives face in the process of commercializing a radical process innovation, we can help them to achieve sustainability more effectively.Originality/valueThe paper responds to the call to increase our understanding of radical process innovations by utilizing a unique ethnographic research methodology of active participant-observation complemented by independent third-party face-to-face interviews.
Databáze: OpenAIRE