Unpacking the Interplay Between Process Improvement Approaches and Product Innovation
Organizations' capacity to reconcile innovation, adaptation and exploration with efficiency, productivity gains and exploitation is crucial for their success, yet this constitutes a fundamental and enduring management challenge. Over the past decades, scholars in operations management, strategy and innovation management have proposed divergent conceptual arguments and drawn conflicting empirical conclusions in relation to the impact of process improvement (PI) approaches such as lean, total quality management (TQM) six sigma, and theory of constraints on incremental and radical product innovation. For some, PI can lead to both types of innovation; for others, PI inevitably hinders organizations' capacity to innovate their products, particularly in a radical way. In addition to the heterogeneity of theoretical and empirical arguments that exist in the literature, little is known about how PI interacts with innovation and what mechanisms that companies can use to manage the interplay between PI and incremental and radical product innovation. Therefore, this thesis focuses on exploring this interplay and on identifying the mechanisms that organizations use to manage it. Method This research used a qualitative multiple case study approach. Four companies were purposefully sampled. All of the selected companies are large manufacturing companies based in the United Kingdom. However, they operate in three different industries automotive, aerospace and pharmaceutical and vary in their implementation of PI approaches and in the degree of their product innovativeness. Over a 15 month period in 2016 2017, 44 semi structured interviews with informants from different functional specialisms were conducted, and relevant documents collected. Data were analysed through a multi stage iterative process. Findings This thesis' findings depart from previous arguments made in the literature by identifying four different configurations for managing the interplay between PI and product innovation "strategic and holistic" "facilitating and empowering" "operational" "project based" and several associated mechanisms. These configurations comprise of multiple factors including how PI is deployed in the organization (scope and formality) the adaptation of PI to the area that it is used in, and various managerial and structural features in the organization. The interplay between PI and product innovation substantially differs depending on the configuration, as it is managed through "integration" under the "facilitating and empowering" and "strategic and holistic" configurations, and through "separation" under the "operational" and "project based" ones. Additionally, PI has the potential to enable product innovation (both incremental and radical) if it is loosely integrated with it; however, if it is formally integrated in the innovation processes it might constrain radical innovation. Originality and Contributions This thesis unpacks the interplay between PI and product innovation and posit a configurational view of the interplay. In particular it highlights the importance of PI deployment (formality, scope, adaptability) in shaping the potential innovation outcome. In doing so, research findings provide nuance to the debate on the "productivity dilemma" and question the dichotomic perspective on efficiency and innovation, as articulated in the organizational ambidexterity literature. Indeed, adopting a configurational perspective, productivity and efficiency enhancing activities, such as PI, appear not necessarily as barriers or enablers of innovation, but as having various types of impacts depending on several factors. Additionally, this study re conceptualizes PI as a bundle of approaches that evolve over time due to different contextual factors, rather than a set of discrete, clearly codified sets of tools and practices. Finally, how and where PI is used in the organization seem to matter more than the types of tools being implemented when considering the impact of PI on product innovation. Keywords: Process improvement, innovation, ambidexterity, configuration