Summary:

Organizational innovations have increasingly become a target of empirical research. While it is widely acknowledged that organizational innovations are crucial for companies’ capability to deal with core organizational problems more effectively and to increase overall competitiveness, conceptual issues have not been high on the research agenda. So far organizational innovation is still a very vague concept and no general definition has been reached. And there is little systematic knowledge available about the development, diffusion and economic consequences of organizational innovations. One might hope that by adding knowledge through empirical inquiry, false assumptions can gradually be eliminated and a better insight can be gained into the complex phenomenon.

But the growing literature on organizational innovation coincides with a lack of coherent knowledge creation; the accumulated research findings are difficult to compare and to integrate. The purpose of this article is to take stock of our understanding of the concept of organizational innovation in order to make research more comparative and to allow for a more coherent development of knowledge in this field. This is of particular importance as the traditional good practices of organizing production and business processes do no longer apply when the transformation of informational and knowledge resources has to be managed.