Emil Ahlström: The Dominant Divide: Innovation in Project-Based Organisations

Abstract

Projects, temporary organisations, have long been lauded as creative hotspots and as innovative workshops. Project-based organisations on the other hand are often seen in the literature as slow innovators, as being conservative. This "innovation paradox", the creative projects within conservative organisations seems to be related to the way that the firms are structured and the different logics which arise in the permanent organisation and its temporary projects respectively. 

The aim of this study is to understand and explain the challenges surrounding innovation which comes from being a project-based organisation. The aim is reached by asking two questions: What are the ways in which innovations are (or are not) spread and adopted in a project-based organisation; and, how does the existence of separate logics within a project-based organisation affect innovation adoption? Through primarily semi-structured interviews, six embedded sub-cases in a large Swedish construction firm are presented. Using the framework of Dominant Logic, the study sets out to identify both manifested and cognitive dimensions of the two organisation’s logics.

The analysis shows how the permanent organisation often looks for strategic, long-term returns from innovation and that they use the projects to identify the value of an innovation. At the same time the time-bound projects expect their own investments to give returns within their limited existence. This can create a logical misalignment. When an innovation “makes sense” within both organisations however, innovation adoption can be rather quick. The co-existence of different organisational values is also shown to affect the strategy of adoption. While project autonomy was important, certain values such as sustainability and worker safety afforded the permanent organisation greater ability to steer the projects to adopt.

By understanding the logics in the firm, a divide between the temporary and permanent organisations appears, and it seems able to explain the difficulties of innovation. The idea of construction and project-based organisations as conservative is thus challenged in this thesis and a main finding is that to make innovations widely used they must align with existing logics. Furthermore, certain individuals who are placed at the borderline between the organisations are better able to understand both logics, something which could facilitate innovation alignment. This ability does not completely overcome the chasm however, and actors in project-based organisations seem to have to get used to the existence of a divide.