Engines of growth – the importance of 'routine innovation activities'

This paper adopts a fresh perspective at what companies could do to achieve growth and profitability over the mid- and long-term. Various disciplines of management science have examined the determinants, processes, and consequences of innovation in organisations with mixed and often inconsistent results. While we adopt a perspective of organisational design in innovation management, we differ from conventional approaches in our selecting the free-market economy as the starting point of research. We advocate that organisational design could learn from the system of free-market economy that has been associated with extra-ordinary growth as compared with other economic systems. After analysing the drivers of growth in free-market economy, we discuss the concept of 'routine innovation activities' and its implications from a perspective of organisational design. We advocate that organisations need to be designed with the aim of reaping the growth benefits associated with 'routine activities' and establish a catalogue of principles guiding practitioners of organisational design. The article closes with a case study illustrating the argument.