Of Shadow and Substance: The Dilemma of Measuring Innovation

Contemporary accounts and trends underscore the centrality of creativity and innovation in business and management practice. Such competing values as, for instance, development, consolidation or stabilisation are in no way as appealing as concepts in management thinking today, and a focus on earlier research concerns like efficiency or effectiveness has a decidedly stale flavour beside the more sparky appeal of an innovative approach. Hence the innovation industry and its gurus, many of whom draw widely on techniques incubated in the world of the arts, traditionally regarded as the crucible of creativity. In this domain itself, the arts, leisure and entertainment industries, the insatiable appetite for innovation is particularly in evidence, given an abundance of prefabricated cultural 'product', propagated by increasingly futuristic means of diffusion, as well as an audience whose senses and sensibilities are relentlessly bombarded by banality and sated by sameness. While other historical periods may have emphasised accuracy or fidelity of representation or notions of beauty as preeminent objectives of the artistic process, these now appear superannuated by comparison with the overweening demand for the new. Furthermore, one of the most frequent arguments in favour and justification of public funding of culture - and one which has intensified in the face of reduced or threatened public expenditure in the western world - is the space it allows for artistic innovation and experiment, affording protection from the `blasted heath' of the marketplace by obviating the necessity to delve into 'the greasy till' of commerce. It is surprising given the primacy of the claims in both cases and the tacit and sometimes explicit linkages between business and artistic innovation that no study of the former, among the thousands which exist, has focused on the processes of the latter. Furthermore there is a corresponding dearth of research on innovation in arts organisations themselves. What might be the reasons for this diffidence? Why, despite frequent metaphorical reference and analogy, has there been no attempt to glean from an empirical investigation of the world of the arts and the management styles and processes of arts organisations what lessons as can be transferred to the business world? 2 And why do arts organisations not seek to model themselves in any more scientific way on the experience and practices of their more exemplary peers? First, from the wider organisational perspective, management research on business innovation, while it may be characterised on the whole as falling under the heading of exploratory as opposed to formal explanatory theory3, has followed a well worn path. This has been outlined by King (1990) under three headings: first, antecedent factors which comprise the characteristics and behaviour of organisation members, the characteristics of the organisation and extraorganisational factors; second, process research; and third, the discussion on different types of innovation. Though extensive in volume, this literature is narrow in focus, placing most emphasis on technological innovation and preferring to consider processes in large private sector organisations - in the words of Van de Ven "narrowly defined on the one hand and technically oriented on the other" (1986:590). In recent times actual empirical examinations have been few and far between, researchers tending either to adopt a normative approach or to focus on the refinement and schematisation of earlier work. This tendency has occasioned some distortions including the perpetuation of certain biases and a lack of flexibility with regard to developments in organisational thinking and theory4. This summary account describes the direction of research into business innovation which despite its volume may be characterised by a certain avoidance in its reluctance to deal either with empirical reality or advances in theory. …