International Journal of Innovation Management

Games of innovation are sets of rules that structure meso-level innovation systems composed of organisational actors that compete and collaborate to create value. All game rules are coherent, with one dominant value-creation logic, and refer to all the aspects of managing innovation, from competitive strategies and policies for investment in innovation capabilities to practices for identifying opportunities and managing projects. The dominant logic that guides them stems from prevailing conditions for innovation, which open certain avenues by which participants produce and capture value, but which close others. The rules stabilise and ensure the reproduction of innovation systems for long periods of time.

Many executives see innovation as an unmanageable process, riddled with risks. The research we conducted with the Industrial Research Institute, interviewing over 200 vice-presidents of research and development and chief technical officers in many sectors around the world, yields a more nuanced view. Innovation becomes manageable once managers move away from normative prescriptions that view the process as uniform and recognise that different rules and practices apply to different circumstances.

Our argument is that clusters of interdependent firms contributing to the building of a set of interacting products and services tend to self-organise themselves into distinct and relatively persistent "games of innovation". Such games operate at a meso level of analysis, grouping together many complementary agents, such as competitors, suppliers, public regulators, universities, innovation-support agencies, and venture capitalists. Six games of innovation, each with a distinct set of rules for innovating, have been identified around value-creation exchanges between buyers and sellers. Three games focus on market creation: "patent-driven discovery", "systems integration" and "platform orchestration". Market maintenance games are "cost-based competition", "systems extension and engineering" and "customised mass production".

The perspective proposed in this paper recognises that heterogeneous innovation patterns and strategies can coexist within a single industrial sector and that the same game can be played in many sectors. Specific conditions call for distinct rules and practices. Customer expectations, for example, are central in some games but almost irrelevant in others. Rules for managing innovation are neither generic best practices that can be applied universally nor narrow industry recipes. They are game- and role-specific ways to create and capture market value.

This paper contributes to explaining how and why distinct games of innovation emerge by suggesting that games are nested in innovation systems with persistent innovation dynamics. Dominant lifecycle models focus on how innovation systems transit from an effervescent stage, to product innovation, to process innovation, and so on. They propose specific mechanisms and limiting conditions that affect knowledge production and investment to explain these systematic transitions. Building on these models, we rethink the conditions and mechanisms of innovation to suggest that endogenous renewal cycles can re-create the knowledge and funding necessary to maintain innovation systems for long periods in one stage. We take steps towards developing a theoretical model of innovation dynamics that extends the applicability of lifecycle theories and unifies them with emerging views such as high-velocity innovation and hyper-competition. We also describe three possible types of endogenous renewal cycles, each sustaining a different level of knowledge dynamism and enabling different types of games of innovation.

Currently, all major IT and telecom firms are busy trying to stimulate non-contractual complementary developments around their own core competences and offerings. But little has been done to explain the logic, strengths, and weaknesses of non-contractual innovation. The literature on open-platform leadership recognises the importance of non-contractual innovation, but only within the limited confines of a normative approach based on two implicit assumptions: that a platform's core and periphery are sharply and easily differentiated and that platforms are always grown and orchestrated from a monolithic core. Through analysis of two cases of decentralised open innovation: the emergence of video rental stores and the emergence of desktop-publishing systems. I argue that these assumptions do not apply to all open platforms. I conclude that by forcing a hierarchical framework onto the analysis, the normative approach underplays the role of non-contractual innovation and turns a blind eye to the radically self-organised and unforeseeable nature of some platforms' success.

This paper leverages current thinking on organising for innovation to create new ideas on contingent organising for innovation. I argue that all successfully innovative organisations need to be built on the same higher-level principles of innovative organising, but the relative emphasis on which principles and how they are implemented will vary by game of innovation. I focus on four organising activities: defining the work that will be done, differentiating that work into coherent units, integrating those differentiated units, and controlling the whole system over time. I synthesise the literature into four principles of innovative organising: defining innovative work as professional practice; differentiating innovative work into domains of practice; integrating these domains via strategic sensemaking, and controlling the work with social rules. Finally, particular configurations of these principles are developed for various MINE games of innovation, based on the dynamics of each game.

This paper introduces the notion of inter-organisational time, a dominant temporal institution at the organisational field level, and an environmental dimension absent from the extant literature. I argue that concepts such as temporal institutions and entrainment can help explain persistent dynamics in an organisational field that pace innovative activities. I use Quebec's biopharmaceutical field to illustrate a shift in inter-organisational time since the technology bubble burst. I suggest that including inter-organisational time in future analyses of organisational fields may improve understanding of the strategic context of innovation.

Long-term success requires the challenging task of persistently creating and capturing value. Institutional theory addresses persistence in organisations and inter-organisational fields, but uncovers a paradox: while institutionalisation increases survival chances, it generates inertia, rigidity, and resistance to change, and therefore reduces long-term competitive advantage. The historical analysis of two long-lived electrical manufacturing companies (General Electric and Westinghouse) suggests that both developed a distinctive technological competence, and, for many decades, persistently created value. However, General Electric's distinctive competences also included dynamic and value-capture capabilities. These findings suggest that long-term success may occur in the presence of institutionalisation, if institutionalisation encompasses dynamic capabilities. In addition, this paper suggests that a resource-preservation dimension be included in the dynamic capabilities construct and in institutional theory, and that depending on how institutionalisation is conducted, the organisation may create habits that prevent or foster the side effects of institutionalisation processes.

Games of innovation involve four types of organisational players: firms, governments, universities, and nonprofit organisations. Of the four, nonprofit organisations are the least well understood. To capture the contributions of all types of organisational players, I adopt the perspective of a focal firm and consider the roles that other organisations play with respect to its ability to innovate. I introduce the roles of institutional enabler and institutional balancer, in which another organisation increases or decreases, respectively, the focal firm's ability to innovate by shaping the networks and markets in which it participates. I then develop propositions regarding the importance of the institutional enabler and balancer roles, and the roles of nonprofit organisations, in games of innovation.