Problem
Innovation is shaped by how organisations are designed: which ideas get funded, how much freedom people have, how quickly information flows, and how work is divided up. Those choices can slow down the very creativity organisations are trying to unlock. We treat organisation design as a lever on innovation itself, and use rigorous field, archival and computational methods to show how design choices can produce better results.
Science
We examined an organisation that funds and supports early-stage ventures that revised its selection process three times across thousands of applications. We distinguished two types of freedom in research and development (R&D): 'strategic autonomy', choosing which problems to tackle, and 'operational autonomy', choosing how to solve them. We analysed formal records of new ideas to test how each type of freedom shaped creative outcome. In another project, we used computational modelling to test the claim that fast learning harms exploration by causing organisations to converge too quickly on the same ideas. Finally, we studied the US automotive industry to examine what happens when the same task is shared across different products.
Outcome
Each study generated new insights. Even when a selection process is deliberately improved, it still makes mistakes; adding more steps can make evaluators more error-prone, not less. When researchers choose their own problems to work on, they tend to think more narrowly, and that narrower thinking leads to less creative results. Timely feedback helps organisations keep exploring new ideas rather than converging too quickly. And sharing tasks across products saves money but can raise the risk of malfunction, though that risk falls as experience builds.
Change
Across studies, we have shown that innovation is engineered as much as inspired. By clarifying how selection, autonomy, feedback timing and task structure shape inventive outcomes, our research gives organisations evidence-based guidance for designing the conditions in which innovation can thrive.
Read more:
https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2023.17482
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.respol.2025.105271
https://doi.org/10.1002/smj.70098
https://doi.org/10.1002/smj.70042