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Scenario thinking: a practice-based approach for the identification of opportunities for innovation
Dr. David SarpongBristol Business School
University of the West of England, Bristol, [email protected]
Prof. Mairi MacleanUniversity of Exeter Business School
University of Exeter, Exeter, [email protected]
Published as: Sarpong, D. & Maclean, M. (2011). Scenario thinking: A practice-based approach for the identification of opportunities for innovation, Futures, 40(10): 1154-1163.
ABSTRACT
Drawing on the social theory of practice, this paper ‘unpacks’ scenario thinking in the form of strategizing in product innovation teams to explore when and how the practice may lead to the identification of opportunities for innovation. Adopting a case-based approach, three software companies engaged in four new product development projects served as our empirical research sites. We found creative emergence and open-endedness of the practice in innovation teams serving as quintessentially embedded modalities and contingencies that supports the identification of opportunities for innovation as a potential outcome of scenario thinking. We also suggest a framework that specifies how specific team practices supporting scenario thinking (strategic conversation and human-material interactions, and reflexivity-in-practice) may operate in combination or serially, and which may lead in turn to the identification of opportunities for innovation.
Keywords:Innovation; New product development; Practice approach; Scenario thinking
1. Introduction
While it is widely acknowledged that the link between cause and effect is often
elusive, the last few years have seen a remarkable upsurge in the number of scholarly
papers reporting a direct link between scenario planning/scenario thinking and
innovation. This causal link has served not only as a point of convergence for many
conceptual as well as empirical studies on scenario planning, but has also been the
starting point for much theorising on the part of scenario planners [1-3]. While these
studies have made an invaluable contribution to enriching our understanding of the
relationship between scenario thinking and an organisation’s ability to innovate, they
often fall short in their ability to demonstrate how and when the practice may lead to
the innovations they often report.
This paper attempts to bridge this epistemic gap by providing new insight into
the management and foresight literature in the following ways: first, we conceptualise
scenario thinking as an everyday social practice played out in the day-to-day activities
of a group of competent actors as an actualisation of a continuous process of
becoming [4]. Second, we move beyond the cause and effect linkage between scenario
thinking and innovation to provide a logical account of when the practice may
contribute to the identification of opportunities for innovation. Following Nonaka [5,
p. 14], we refer to innovation as “a process in which the organization creates and
defines problems and then actively develops new knowledge to solve them”. We
develop our contribution in the context of the software industry, and focus more
specifically on product innovation teams who may be relied upon as a strategic group
within the organisation to exploit its distributed expertise and limited resources to
craft and deliver a mechanism for building the organisational market-technology
knowledge base.
The structure of the paper is as follows: in the next section, the salient
literature on the causal link between scenario thinking and innovation is reviewed. We
then draw on the practice turn in contemporary social theory to explore scenario
thinking as a social practice. Next, we introduce a framework for classifying, before
presenting an overview of the empirical research context and the methods employed
in the study under the general rubric of research methodology. Following this, we
present our research findings and conclude the paper with a discussion of the
implications of our research for theory and practice.
2. Scenario thinking as a precursor for innovation
Scenario thinking is the use of scenarios to stimulate innovative solutions for a
possible future context. The practice in organisations is often traced back to the Royal
Dutch/Shell Planning group [6,7], where it was used as a tool for long-range corporate
planning in the early 1970s. The literature is replete with multifarious but similar
methods and methodologies on how to conduct scenario thinking. A typical
‘manifesto’ on how it unfolds is provided by the Centre for Innovative Leadership, as
cited in [8], which identified the following six generic steps in scenario thinking:
INSERT TABLE 1 ABOUT HERE
Beyond being historically employed as a mere planning tool, a growing
number of organisations support and conduct scenario planning exercises, issuing
calls on managers to integrate these into their organisational processes [9,10];
scenario planning having been heralded as leading to other desirable organisational
outcomes such as adaptive learning [11], improved decision making [12],
organisational ambidexterity [13], creativity [14] and innovation [15,16].
However, with innovation identified as a fundamental capability required to
sustain competitive advantage [17,18], much of the burgeoning literature has striven
therefore to establish a positive relationship between scenario thinking and innovation
[19]. Even work which does not report a causal link often presents innovation as a by-
product of scenario thinking, by identifying various outcomes whose derived
theoretical and managerial implications could promote innovation [20]. This emerging
paradigm has come to represent something of a conundrum. On one hand, much of the
existing literature explicitly or tacitly agrees with the validity of this ‘factual’ claim.
Nevertheless, studies that have attempted to explore this causal link have done very
little empirically or theoretically to show when and how innovation may arise in
practice. From this perspective, rather than just treating innovation as a by-product of
scenario thinking, we explore scenario thinking as a nexus of real-time, taken-for-
granted situated activities which may serve as a precursor to innovation. In this
regard, we draw on the practice turn to conceptualise scenario thinking as a social
practice in a flux of transformation, played out in the everyday work of a group of
competent actors, as an actualisation of a continuous process of becoming [4].
3. A practice approach to scenario thinking
The theory of practice is concerned with the taken-for-granted sense of space and
routines of actors as inscribed in the ways they enact their practice(s). It encompasses
what Benner (cited in [21], p. 426) describes as a “rich socially embedded clinical
know-how that encompasses perceptual skills, transitional understandings across time,
and understanding of the particular in relation to the general”. In simple terms, it
refers to what people do in their situated activities. Practices can be seen as
permeating almost every part of social life. For Schatzki ([22], p. 471), they are
“organized human activities” made up of “an organized, open-ended spatial-manifold
of actions”. Elsewhere, placing emphasis on actors’ actual activities in practice, what
those activities are and how these activities are enacted, Schatzki [23, p. 90] argues
that:
“Practices consist of both doings and sayings, suggesting that analysis must be concerned with both practical activity and its representations. Moreover we are given a helpful depiction of the components which form a ‘nexus’, the means through which doings and sayings hang together and can be said to be coordinated”.
This ‘hanging together’ or “held-togetherness” (Zusammenhang) in Schatzki’s
[23, p. 14] terms, suggests a temporal interrelatedness, while activities also serve as a
context within which other activities occur. In making sense of these ‘social activities’
underpinning the practice of scenario thinking, the everyday activities that innovation
teams engage in to fulfil their roles come together to form the nexus of the practice.
These activities are not to be understood as mere ‘building blocks’ of the practice,
enacted just for the sake of the practice; rather, their enactment is goal oriented and
based on the experience and intelligibility of actors. The role of intelligibility
however, brings to the fore the role of mental organisation in practices. Schatzki [24,
p. 49], in accounting for this, refers to mental phenomena such as desires, hopes, fear
and anxiety as fundamental “states of affairs” that enable actors to cope with their
involvement with the world. As such, expressed in behaviour, they inform activities
by extending understanding and determining what makes sense to people. Here, it can
be argued that scenario thinking, by virtue of being a disciplined knowledge-driven
process of imagining possible futures, is conditioned by uncertainties, embodies
capacities such as know-how and dispositions, and is centrally organised around
shared skills and practical understandings. So, in conceptualising scenario thinking as
a social practice, we give ontological priority to organisational members and those
regular discernable patterns of activities that take place within the ambit of their
praxis. Epistemological primacy is placed on the actors’ quest to understanding the
future of their complex business environment, which is characterised by uncertainty,
serving to condition the actors’ behaviour and conduct in their everyday situated
practice (praxiology).
INSERT FIGURE 1 ABOUT HERE
Driven by these assumptions, we define scenario thinking as the bundles of
human actions and practices in context directed towards understanding the past and
the future in the present in order to cope with future uncertainties within the
contingencies of the moment (see Figure 1). From this perspective, scenario thinking
emerges as an ongoing social practice whose routines and activities are enacted on an
everyday basis, sometimes with very little reflection, from an unintended action to an
unintended outcome in the moment. It continues unabated in as much as relations may
remain unexplained even when anomalies are brought within the range of vision.
Viewed in this light, organisational actors apply their collective knowledge and the
resources at their disposal, including those capabilities gained from their conscious
individual experiences and collective psychic life, in a dynamic, generative way to
probe the unknown future. As a collective shared practice that permeates everyday
‘doings’, its enactment and engagement in practice requires emphasis on coordinated
action and shared understandings of possible futures. Thus, the specific relational take
on scenario thinking, as argued here, is one that takes a critical look at the
dispositional in-betweens rather than the isolated subjects or wider structuring forces.
The practice therefore is conceptualised as flexible and durable, as opposed to being
stable or institutionalised.
4. Framework for classifying potential outcomes of scenario thinking in teams
We present a conceptual framework here to extend our understanding as to when
scenario thinking may lead to the identification of opportunities for innovation. The
framework is built around two specific lines of attention. The first is strategic
conversation and human material interaction. Here, we refer to those verbal
interactions between and among organisational members in their everyday situated
activities that go beyond mere information exchange to focus on improving the
organisation’s core activities, and the creation and capturing of value relevant for
competitiveness. This is supplemented by the ongoing, coordinated, regular and
continuous interaction between themselves and their material objects. In context,
human-material interaction provides possibilities for elaboration by enabling actors to
construct meanings and make sense of their material and structural environment,
which serves as a mechanism for the continuous reconstruction of their social
structures.
It should be noted that ongoing strategic conversations and human material
interactions are not mutually exclusive. Both phenomena are intrinsic to the shared
practice of scenario thinking. Without interaction among actors, the notion of a team,
as a community of practitioners, does not exist. Likewise, without interaction with
epistemic objects or material artefacts, the shared practice that bounds the community
becomes non-existent. By virtue of this it is assumed that “the shadow of the Other is
always implicated in the articulation of the One” ([25], p. 5). Moreover, putting the
communities’ structurally formed capacities developed through practice and
experiences into re-usable knowledge, which in turn drives and sustains their practice,
requires reflexivity in practice [26]. Reflexivity-in-practice here is about intelligibly
challenging those constraints imposed by social structures and peoples’ taken-for-
granted assumptions about reality. Reflexivity-in-practice refers to the ongoing
collective, deliberate and conscious locally reflexive orders of actions engaged in by
organisational members’ that undergird the perception, reproduction and
transformation of their social structures. In this regard, engaging in reflexivity is not
an aim in itself, but rather a consequence of taking a ‘step back’ from technical
rationality to question and challenge intelligibly everyday ‘doings’, routine actions
and collective assumptions about the world [27]. These are transmitted among
members in practice in the form of bodily doings, interactions and precepts which
over time become part and parcel of the communities’ taken-for-granted culture of
enacting, evaluating and reconstructing temporal structures.
The emergence and identification of opportunities for innovation, we argue, is
enabled through the ongoing strategic conversations and material interactions and
reflexivity shared by organisational members through a variety of mechanisms that
may operate in combination, or serially, to lead to the identification of opportunities
for innovation. Therefore, rather than assuming that any of the practices identified
here independently lead to the identification of opportunities for innovation, four
dynamics are distinguished to offer new insights into how the extent of interaction
among actors and their material artefacts and reflexivity may lead to opportunities for
innovation, as shown in Figure 2.
INSERT FIGURE 2 ABOUT HERE
4.1 Morphostatic Mode
Organisations in a ‘morphostatic mode’ sustain high strategic conversation and human
material interactions, but lack reflexivity in practice. Promoting conversation and
interactions without reflexivity is akin to harnessing what can be described as
‘relevance’ at the expense of ‘rigour’. In this situation, the organisation can be
assumed to be not only experiencing an epistemic drift, but also gearing towards a
perfect adaptation state in a fast-moving environment characterised by discontinuity
and ambiguities. Also, the failure of the organisation to reflect on its practice while
channelling efforts in conversations and interactions implies that the team might
become entrapped in their taken-for-granted assumptions and underlying beliefs,
making it difficult to spot opportunities for innovation, cope with challenges or
creatively renew themselves and their practice when new contingencies arise.
4.2 Dynamic Mode
Organisations in a ‘dynamic mode’ combine high quality-intense strategic
conversation, material interaction and a great deal of reflexivity in practice in their
everyday work. They are sustained by their inherent ambidexterity, which enables
them to interact with their epistemic objects and concurrently reflect on their everyday
practice. Organisations that are able to develop this kind of repertoire, by virtue of
their orientation, can also be characterised as ‘vagile’, since they have the ability to
‘think’ beyond the theoretical boundaries of their products, embrace discontinuity and
open-endedness in their innovation processes; hence the ability to succeed in their
struggle to explore opportunities. This in turn empowers them to develop efficiency in
their practice, which helps them not only to explore intelligibly, but also to exploit
emerging possibilities that come into view. Some of these identified possibilities are
bound to lead to strategic insights, and those that take root potentially grow into the
oaks of innovation.
4.3 Speculation Mode
Those organisations identified as being in a ‘speculation mode’ are those that
primarily display a precondition for reflexivity in practice, but do very little to engage
in highly intense-quality strategic conversations and continuous interaction with their
material objects. They are preoccupied with pure imaginations imbued with rhetoric,
utopian thoughts and fantasies to the extent that creativity becomes dysfunctional in
the strategic process of envisaging the future. Projected possibilities in this kind of
organisation would seldom be grounded in reality. Pragmatic reflexivity-in-practice
cannot independently take place nor be sustained when separated from the context in
which interaction occurs. This is because in the face of ambiguity, reflection in itself
can only be enhanced by interaction with others who may contribute to refine it [28].
Thus, in the absence of interactions, reflexivity in practice can result in some enduring
insights and revelations, but in the end cannot lead to any pragmatic value capture.
4.4 Dysfunctional Mode
Organisations in a ‘dysfunctional mode’ do very little to engage in material
interaction, and the intensity and quality of their strategic conversation is very low.
Similarly, they seldom engage in any form of reflexivity-in-practice. The organisation
is more likely to be shambolic or dormant. Actors in such organisations make very
little effort to get their hands ‘dirty’, to share their insights or to take a step back to
reflect on their experiences, making them bereft of ideas and insights regarding the
future. In this regard, they are destined to miss out on the opportunity of mastering
their practice or even of developing any meaningful understanding of their
technologies and markets. An organisation in this mode can best be described as one
on the verge of extinction. In such a situation, the team basically becomes
dysfunctional; their innovative products under development will automatically end up
on the laboratory shelf. Their survival does not only hang in the balance, but may
ultimately end abruptly within the shortest possible time.
5. Research methodology
We adopted a case-based approach using three software organisations serving as our
empirical research sites. The chosen level of analysis was their product innovation
teams and their four new product development projects. All the organisations selected
for the study were running more than one project at the time of data collection. In
order to improve the scope and generalisations of insights generated by the research,
the following normative criteria were developed to guide the selection of projects
included in the empirical inquiry:
(i) Project(s) should require the commitment of significant resources (in terms of
staffing, time and money) to be pioneered.
(ii) Project(s) should entail the development or generation of innovative product(s),
incorporating new or unfamiliar technology of the organisation and or marketed to
unfamiliar users.
(iii) Project(s) must employ Microsoft’s technologies, including their user and data
interfaces in creating the platform architectures on which the products were built.
INSERT TABLE 2 ABOUT HERE
5.1 The projects
The first project (with Interlab) consisted of an upgrade of internal applications of a
bespoke planning application system for a UK government agency responsible for
developing a world-class community sport system. The second and third projects were
both with Kemitech. The second entailed the development of a product which
was conceived in direct response to the ever-growing concerns with respect to the
management of traffic on British road networks, expected to provide real-time
information on the state of the trunk road network by raising alarms whenever traffic
conditions breached a user-defined threshold. The third project concerned the
development of a train graph application. This had begun as a bespoke project for a
railway company which suddenly abandoned the project. The company decided to
continue with the development of the application in the hope that it might serve as a
potential springboard to showcase the firm’s capabilities to future customers in the
railway industry. The final project (with Mercury) concerned software developed for
security agencies. This involved embedding modern software technologies within an
existing suite of criminal investigation software.
Data for the study were collected over a twelve month period using qualitative
methods of interviews, ethnographical observations and the analysis of the various
projects’ archival documents. In each case-study company, we interviewed all team
members for the specific projects under study, as well as their respective project
managers. Interviews were digitally recorded and transcribed. In addition,
ethnographical observations, including observations of informal conversations
between team members, helped us to gather insight into the everyday situated
practices of the group in question, capturing and deepening our understanding of
unverbalised rules and group norms [29].
Greenwood and Hinings [30, p. 1074] stress the necessity of granting suitable
“attention to the biography of the organisation under scrutiny”. Biographical sketches
of the case organisations, and details of the innovation projects and data collated, are
presented in Tables 2 and 3 respectively. We use pseudonyms to preserve the
anonymity of case-study companies.
INSERT TABLE 3 ABOUT HERE
In analysing our data, our purpose was to ‘unpack’ scenario thinking in the
form of strategizing, in order to ascertain how it manifests in the actions of the
innovation teams. To this end, when scrutinising interview transcripts and observation
notes, we placed emphasis on those strategic episodes and practices geared towards
the identification of novel ideas, processes or procedures qualitatively identified as
capable of improving the new product under development. As scenarios are narratives
or stories about plausible futures, we identified banal narratives that exhibited spatial
and temporal orders, like stories, to capture the actors’ lived experience from the
interview data. Following this, we used Labov’s [31] sociolinguistic structural model
to evaluate and analyze the narrations in their entirety. We gave primacy to those
scenarios that often “raised questions of possibility, impossibility, necessity and
contingency” (Booth et al., ([32], p. 90). We used Hendry and Seidl’s [33]
recommended framework for analyzing strategic episodes to analyze the archival and
observation data. The gathered data were then triangulated and pulled together as a
whole, analyzed and interpreted continuously and iteratively until common themes
emerged and we reached a point of saturation. In analyzing the triangulated data in
practice, we followed Richie and Spencer’s [34] qualitative data analysis framework,
making minor modifications to the process in response to some of the salient
theoretical and methodological commitments.
6. Identification of opportunities for innovation
Based on the analysis of our case data, we identified two quintessentially embedded
modalities and contingencies of scenario thinking as a social practice which
constitutively may lead to the identification of opportunities for innovation during
scenario thinking.
6.1 Creative emergence and open-endedness
The conceptualisation of scenario thinking as a dynamic, social, iterative and never-
to-be-completed practice emphasises the creative emergence of possibilities. At the
same time, the complexity of technologies and an uncertain market lead to identified
strategic possibilities being open-ended in character. Innovation teams therefore need
to develop the capacity to embrace this tension which may impact on their ability to
create or capture tangible value from scenario thinking. Embracing creative
emergence here is therefore the “willingness to engage in a process that is not
predetermined or planned ahead in detail and where outcomes are unknown or
uncertain” (Michlewski, [35], p. 380). This also implies that even though a pragmatic
future might not lead to infinite possibilities, avoiding deliberate planning or bringing
the process to a hasty closure is antithetical to uncovering potential sources of
discontinuity which underpins sustainable value creation and capture. Embracing
creative emergence and open-endedness is not only to ‘ditch’ or abandon habitual
procedures to probe emerging possibilities and projections; it also entails some
conscious attempt to reconcile both emergent and deliberate forms of realities and
repertoires in the pursuit of linking technologies to markets. This was the case when a
Mercury team member claimed:
“We’ve got Windows 7 coming out, and we have already started preparing for that. We have to look at it, and see how the product runs on it. With Vista there were so many issues with security and with XP the speed was fantastic, but you know, security was at first a pain. Now Windows 7 is out and we may still have to make room for another technology.” [Mercury team member A]
Bearing in mind the uncertainty surrounding markets and technological
trajectories, the team, in making room for the next technology, explicitly refused to
firmly ‘nail their colours to the mask’ thereby avoiding the danger of technology ‘lock
in’ which can prevent them from probing potential avenues of exploration in the
future. Another Mercury team member put it this way:
“Everything eventually comes down to market forces. There is no point releasing the application in three years because the quality of web applications available would have moved on by three years. So it is important that we keep moving forward and keep making changes and potentially major changes in order to keep our product competitive.” [Mercury team member B]
What makes these extracts relevant to the embracing of emergence and open-
endedness is the actors’ emphasis on the relational and contextual grounding of
desirable future projections, in which the process, material and market components
coming to presence never equilibrate. Based on the case evidence, two dimensions
were found constitutively to promote contextualisation of the analytical leverage of
creative emergence and open-endedness in contributing to the identification of
opportunities for innovation across the various teams. These include the practice of
re-use of existing software components, or what has come to be known in software
parlance as ‘code-brokerage’ [36], representing both exploitation and the exploration
of possible design ‘spaces’ through ongoing experimentation [37-39]. These two
generative aspects of creative emergence and open-endedness are not analytically
separable in context, as they tend to underpin recursively the effectiveness of how
emergence and open-endedness may contribute to the identification of opportunities
for innovation.
First, the engineering practice of creating new software products from
previous software components, rather than developing the new software ‘from
scratch’, encourages the creation and maintenance of software components and a
knowledge repository. Akin to the concept of the re-use of knowledge, where
knowledge generated is shared, re-used and accumulated [40-42], an accumulated
critical mass of flexible expertise or modular knowledge within the built repository
may enable the team routinely to evaluate, apply and integrate related knowledge in
different contexts. While the practice has come to represent a standard software
development procedure [43,44], the emphasis here is on its creative potential. As
observed by a Kemitech team member:
“A lot our products end up on the shelf, but that is the nature of software development. You pull out components you can re-use again. So, somewhere down the line a completely different project to a model railway may come in and we can go, aha, but we did something similar on the model railway so let’s get that bit, so it’s never completely wasted work.” [Kemitech team member A]
The Kemitech project manager also argued that:
“If we don’t find a buyer, then that will probably be the end of the product in its current configuration. But we tend to re-use ideas quite a lot. We have already shown this particular product to our customers in the rail industry, and they liked the idea, although they feel the actual product is not useful to them. They have asked us to do another demo for their staff. So, although you don’t actually get the chance to sell that product, you do get some use out of it by demonstrating how the technology could be used in other bespoke developments.” [Kemitech project manager]
These two statements highlight how typically the re-use of components across
multiple projects could improve productivity and the quality of new software products
[44]. It also re-affirms the notion that knowledge-driven “processes of inquiry rarely
come to a natural ending of the sort where everything worth knowing about an object
is considered to be known” (Knorr-Cetina [45], p. 186). In a related development, the
Interlab project manager who expressed some surprise as to why Interlab’s main
customers (local governments) were not keen on the company’s new product under
development, was confident that at least the process knowledge accumulated from
developing the product could be re-deployed in the development of other projects
targeted at other industries. She observed that:
“Surprisingly, the local government sector is not very keen on this product. But in other sectors, mobile working is becoming quite important as a more modern way of working, so people are not tied to their desks any more. People expect to be able to take a laptop out and connect via a mobile internet link, or
at least be able to synchronise their work when they come back to the office. The idea is that all future developments will be based on this new sort of bottom layer which will enable us to exploit modern technologies and make use of a single innovation approach. We don’t have to re-develop stuff from scratch.” [Interlab project manager]
Finally, the Mercury project manager also gave an overview of the extent to
which his team intended to modify and extend their existing application to other
markets:
“At the moment, we’ve written the product, and everything is basically in English. But we need to globalise it, and to globalise it means we want to target the product to other police forces in different countries. So, for example, if we want to sell to the French police force, then they would obviously want the French version. That means we need to globalise it in a sense that we can provide separate versions of the same applications, the same in code but just showing everything in French for example, and there are few ways of doing it. We may need to experiment our options to decide a strategy.” [Mercury project manager]
Clearly, the re-use of legacy processes and components involves building new
products whose components in turn may be re-usable in future innovative products.
These 'angular splitoffs' (Knorr-Cetina, [45], p.186) and recurrent use of existing
knowledge may lead to the innovation process unfolding indeterminately, while
simultaneously expanding the set of possible opportunities that could be exploited in
the future. In this regard, potentially plausible but ambiguous scenario narratives that
were previously discarded may be reinvented, adjusted and integrated into other
products that may be developed in the future.
Secondly, the existence of an infinite “design space” [46] and the ongoing
experimentation with new possibilities also serve as additional processes that anchor
emergence and open-endedness as a sustainable resource for the identification of
opportunities for innovation. “Design space” refers to the possible variations of the
dimensions, structure, appearance, colour or any given variation of the design of a
product or process [46]. From a practice perspective, this space is very similar to the
“activity-place space” employed by Schatzki ([24], p. 43) to describe the non-physical
matrix of places and paths where human activities take place spatially. The
exploration to find space through experimentation(s) with scenario narratives enables
actors to probe emerging technologies and new market developments and ‘map’ all
possible alternative designs. For example, the Kemitech project manager observed
with regard to the railway project that:
“Although the product is not sellable in its current format, we have no fears on this project because it’s one of the best positions to be in, because it’s like you are there in a playground of technology and it’s like a sandpit. You make mistakes, its fine; it’s not going to have any repercussions. It will get better as you will learn from those mistakes.” [Kemitech project manager]
Concurrently, the teams’ ongoing experimentations and other exploratory
activities they undertake keep expanding the available ‘space’ at their disposal. The
sustenance of the generative relationship between these two dimensions accounts for
practical projections and the creative evaluation of alternative pathways that
contribute to the identification of opportunities for innovation. They also act as a
mechanism that helps the innovation teams selectively to recognise opportunities in
other contexts or markets where they can apply their existing technologies. As the
Mercury project manager explained:
“The power behind our software is in its searching capability. The original software didn’t start off as software for police forces. It was aimed at antiquarian book sellers. Because it has powerful text searches, it was really quick at pulling up data, so we quickly rolled it to the police forces and they thought it was fantastic for them. Now the antiquarian book people, if you like, have not so much slipped away, they have been pushed away. Our focus has changed, if you like, to the law enforcement agencies. But sure, with a lot of tailoring, there are many more markets available that can support the product.” [Mercury project manager]
The flexibility of the design space was stressed by another member of the
Mercury team:
“The product is being designed to be flexible by any means possible, and generally, whenever there is a choice between making it rigid or spending a bit more time making it flexible, our group always take the time to make it more flexible. Well, again there is incremental soft technologies that Microsoft sort of release constantly over time, and we generally get a lot of warning about those, and we have been able to sort of infuse them beforehand, so that when they are available and they are stable, we have been able to say: ‘I think we should start using this, because it will do that, that and that, and it improves these things’.” [Mercury team member C]
Here, the institutional context within which the design space may contract or
expand becomes the ‘design-space structure’. The multiple markets conceptualised as
a design space-structure therefore define the space available for exploration and may
seem to be expandable if not infinite. However, while structural spaces may not fit
tightly with the relevant technologies at the disposal of the team, functional spaces or
alternative innovative design paths are always indeterminate. In this case, there is still
a window of opportunity for the team to innovate to improve their processes or their
products’ performance features within their existing markets through their ongoing
experimentations with future markets. Active experimentations can be expensive, but
provide a ‘test bed’ for evaluating all conceived possibilities within and beyond
existing markets. Experimentation with new possibilities, it can be argued, is
imperative to understand technologies better and identify opportunities for innovation
in the present and future. Thus, the teams’ understanding of their spaces and
possibilities may play an important role in defining the extent to which emergence
and open-endedness may help them identify opportunities for innovation. From this
perspective, we observed that through these kinds of experimentations, members’
perceptions and actions become focused on the information in their environments,
which they then use to solve their problems. In this sense, they collectively embark on
creative efforts when there is scope for improvement on their epistemic objects.
However, some of these creative efforts might lead to temporary errors and failures.
Notwithstanding, these errors and failures can be seen as not only necessary but an
intrinsic part of exploring novel ideas and possibilities. This is evident in the
following quotations:
“If you make mistakes or take the wrong approach, then luckily that’s exactly what prototyping is for. It’s for you to learn from those mistakes, so you don’t do them again on the real thing.” [Kemitech team member B]
“If you work on one project and do something in a particular way, then at the end you might think, if I had done it slightly different or instead of doing all this, I could have just done this bit instead, and that would have got us the same result, then I feel like that is just part of the job, how it works. You don’t always know the best way of doing something until you’ve done it, so that will come with experience.” [Mercury team member D]
The caution here is about the possibility of an ‘epistemic’ drift that might
occur whenever there is an attempt to place practice prior to theory and see theory as
implied. However, the active experimentation here can be seen as not only purposeful,
but also an instrumental way of independently assessing viable scenario narratives
and their complementary discursive modalities. A Kemitech team member put this
succinctly:
“There is no better way for a Software Engineer to have fun in terms of you seeing something happening. Whether it’s a flick switch or a light coming on or a train moving, it’s good stuff.” [Kemitech team member C]
‘Seeing’ a flick or light, as reported, provides no form of telepathic ‘power’
capable of bringing the yet-to-be-realised future of the product into focus. Again, no
claim of an asymmetric relationship between this kind of ‘seeing’ and innovation as a
result of the interactions is made here. Rather it is argued that this kind of ‘seeing’ has
the potential to illuminate hopes and imaginations. It could provide fertile ground to
challenge taken-for-granted assumptions and stretch imaginations as actors attempt to
make linkages between temporal actions and unfolding events. Thus, projections of
possibilities, as induced by creative emergence and open-endedness, interrelate, shape
and reinforce their propagation during scenario thinking, to help in the identification
of relevant opportunities for innovation.
7. Conclusions
This research seeks to contribute to our understanding of the causal link between
scenario thinking and innovation. More importantly, it aims to improve our
understanding as to when a practice may lead to the generation of this important
organisational outcome. Drawing on the foresight and innovation literature, and the
theory of practice, we studied the real-time, taken-for-granted situated activities that
form the nexus of scenario thinking in product innovation teams engaged in the
linking of organisational technologies with market opportunities to identify when the
predictable relations between scenario thinking and innovation may emerge. In doing
this, the enacted interwoven nexus of canonical activities actors engage in in their
situated practice (including those not discernable to the actors themselves) were the
fundamental realities explained. Moving beyond these truncated expositions, the
relations between these activities and their influence on the teams’ behaviour as
inferred from the case evidence, served as the main factors employed to conceptually
ground the role of scenario thinking in the discovery of opportunities for innovation.
By conceptualising scenario thinking as a social practice, our purpose was to
move beyond the episodic paradigm to present a logical account of how the practice
temporarily unfolds in innovation teams. The new paradigm, as advanced in this
paper, makes no attempt to replace or invalidate the old one; rather, it complements
the first by seeking cumulatively to enrich our understanding of how the activities
forming the nexus of the practice are constituted, reproduced, adapted and defined
through ongoing processes [47]. The claim advanced by this paper is as follows:
scenario thinking as practiced in product innovation teams does not necessarily lead to
innovation. Instead, ongoing creative emergence and open-endedness of the practice,
which constitutively serve as quintessentially embedded, modalities and
contingencies, make it possible for the identification, exploration and exploitation of
opportunities for innovation.
Our findings offer benign insights about the causal link between scenario
thinking and innovation. First, we have shown that scenario thinking in product
innovation teams’ fares differently under different interaction and reflexivity regimes.
Drawing from these regimes, we have proposed a theoretical framework that could
serve as a guide for future research not only to describe other innovation teams and
how they operate, but also to serve as a proxy to gauge the ‘foresightfulness’ of
innovation teams across space and time. Moreover, while the identification of
opportunities for innovation as enabled by these practices has no predetermined target
that teams manoeuvre or garner unique resources in order to attain, nevertheless the
framework may prove a useful diagnostic tool for determining the future state of
innovation teams and highlight potential ways in which strategic self-organised
groups could be reinvigorated. Second, the everyday interactions, the micro-learning
processes and the ongoing activities of innovation teams in their situated practice are
not only relevant, but fundamental to extending our understanding of the link between
scenario thinking and innovation. This is consistent with the recent emerging view
that the everyday microscopic activities and practices of organisational actors to a
large extent shape the ‘foresightfulness’ of organisations [48]. This study emphasises
the importance of scenario thinking in helping to identify relevant opportunities for
innovation in order to help extend both practitioners’ and scholars’ understanding of
the causal link that is often made between scenario thinking and innovation.
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