Between breaking the rules and routine

How do innovation processes work in companies? The most successful products are the result of spontaneous initiatives by individuals - rather than a strategically organised process. Excerpt from a research article by Prof Dr Jannika Mattes. Patients have always been administered this vital medication in syringes. All attempts to develop a tablet form have failed. Mr Schmidt, an employee of a large German pharmaceutical company, is simply not satisfied with this. He pores over specialised literature and travels to one conference or another. The idea of developing a completely different combination of active ingredients is born. His boss agrees to let him invest a few hours of his working time in this idea. It is the birth of a drug that will cost several billion euros to develop. It becomes a "blockbuster" for the company. The fact that ideas from individuals become strategically important projects is not the exception but the rule in large corporations. Innovation processes in particular do not initially proceed in a straight line, nor are they strategically planned. To stay with the example: Group headquarters and the executive floor only found out about the project almost a year later. Only then did Mr Schmidt's idea become an official project. The situation is similar in a German transport company, which is characterised by a solid engineering culture. The idea sketch for the project, which the company is now marketing as a strategically important invention, lay in an employee's drawer for years. Nowhere did he find an open ear for his idea. Years later, he met an employee from another location at an internal conference. He had an idea that fitted in well with his. They decide to combine their inventions and fight together to realise them. From painful experience, they both know how difficult it will be to turn this into an official project. So they start quietly at first: One of them simulates the entire project at home on their own computer. They communicate by email and think about who they need to involve in order to increase the chances of success. Before the project is officially applied for, several people have already been working on it for years. Both examples show that innovations are not created as strategic projects in the boardroom. Rather, it is the commitment of individuals that is crucial when initiating development projects. The innovation theorist Joseph Schumpeter already formulated such an idea at the beginning of the 20th century: In his eyes, successful innovations are individual projects, and their success depends primarily on how the "entrepreneur" markets his or her invention. Selling an idea well - in Schumpeter's eyes on the free market, but in modern companies also internally vis-à-vis the funding bodies - thus becomes the central success criterion for innovation. But how do such individual projects become major developments involving a large number of participants? Read the unabridged answer from Oldenburg social scientist Prof Dr Jannika Mattes - in the research magazine EINBLICKE.