Accelerating the Innovation Process: A Systematic Review and Realist Synthesis of the Research Literature

• Published date: 01 October 2017
• Author: Krsto Pandza,Paul Grimshaw,Paul Ellwood
• Date: 01 October 2017
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/ijmr.12108

International Journal of Management Reviews, Vol. 19, 510–530 (2017)

DOI: 10.1111/ijmr.12108

Accelerating the Innovation Process: A

Systematic Review and Realist Synthesis

of the Research Literature

Paul Ellwood, Paul Grimshaw1and Krsto Pandza1

University of Liverpool Management School, Chatham Street, Liverpool L69 7ZH, UK, and 1Leeds University

Business School, Maurice Keyworth Building, University of Leeds, Leeds LS2 9JT, UK

Corresponding author email: Paul.Ellwood@liverpool.ac.uk

There is continued interestamong academics, practitioners and policy-makers in meth-

ods to achieve accelerated innovation. Academic studies of this complex phenomenon

have succeeded in reaching a high degree of consensus on the antecedents of innova-

tion speed. The aim in this review is to elucidate further the mechanisms underlying

management interventions to promote speed. The review adopts a theory-led, real-

ist synthesis of innovation speed research – the first example of this methodology in

management studies. The authors develop a new time-based framework for categoriz-

ing the innovation-speed literature. The framework has a CIMO logic, and is built by

invoking the organizational studies literature on time. The authors contextualize the

innovation-speed literature in relation to the three generic temporal challenges faced

by all organizations: reducing temporal uncertainty; resolving temporal conflicts over

activities; and allocating resources amid conditions of temporal scarcity. They prob-

lematize extant explanations of innovation speed as not taking account of different

temporal orientations (temporal dichotomies) within innovation work,and thereby ne-

glecting a potential barrier to achieving accelerated innovationoutcomes. They further

draw on the literatureon time in organizations to suggest new avenues of research, and

methodological approaches new to the study of innovation speed. The principal contri-

bution of this review is to offer a new conceptual perspective on the complex empirical

research examining how innovation projects may be accelerated from original idea to

launch.

Introduction

This paper presents a systematic review of research

that has sought to identify how innovation projects

may be progressed more quickly from first idea to

launch. Studies of accelerated innovation haveproved

popular with academic researchers, professional in-

novation managers and policy-makers. This topic

emerged as an area of significant research interest

in the late 1980s and early 1990s with the burgeon-

ing focus on globalization and the increasing pres-

sure of time-based competition (Stalk 1988; Starr

1992). The subject remains a feature of contempo-

rary business discourse on globalization and com-

petitive strategy (e.g. Williamson and Yin 2014), as

increased innovation speed has been shown to be

associated with new product success as measured

financially, or in terms of technical quality and cus-

tomer value (Cankurtaran et al. 2013). However, some

authors have argued that an overemphasis on speed

in innovation strategies can have negative trade-offs

(Calantone and Di Benedetto 2000), hidden costs

(Crawford 1992) or risks fixating management at-

tention to the detriment of other factors (Chen et al.

2012; Kessler and Bierly 2002; Lambert and Slater

1999; Smith 1999).

The challenge of innovation speed has been

framed in a number of ways: reducing new prod-

uct development (NPD) cycle times (Griffin 1993,

1997) and, conversely, increasing rates of product

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Accelerating the Innovation Process 511

obsolescence; delivery of innovative products to mar-

ket quickly (Jones 2003) and the benefits of strate-

gies such as ‘first-mover’ to provide ‘lock-in’ advan-

tages (Dumaine 1989; Lieberman and Montgomery

1988); or fast responding, cost saving, ‘second-to-

market’ strategies (Emmanuelides 1991). Empirical

research has sought to identify the antecedents of in-

novation speed predominantly in the context of NPD.

Such studies have generated a long list of accelera-

tion techniques that are suggested may speed an idea

to launch. The resulting literature spans a range of

industries, firm sizes, technologies and geography.

In undertaking this review, we sought an explana-

tion of the mechanism of speed amid such a diversity

of innovation projects. We followed a systematic re-

view process (Denyer and Tranfield 2009) in order

to: provide a transparent account of our method; be

able to include relevant data regardless of the types

of research design used in original papers; and be

able to develop explanations for how different accel-

eration techniques actually worked. The overarching

question that motivates this literature reviewis: What

management interventions have been employedto ac-

celerate innovationprojects and reduce the time taken

to progress from ‘idea’ to ‘launch’?

Existing literature reviews on this subject, although

very informative in identifying numerous antecedents

and contingencies, are limited in articulating under-

lying mechanisms that explain how interventions in-

crease innovation speed. In response, we propose

a new framing of innovation speed by examining

the way in which time (rather than explicitly speed)

has been studied within organizations. We argue that

speeding innovations requires both efficient and ef-

fective use of time. This in turn requires a richer

perspective on the way in which time is experienced

in organizations (Bluedorn and Denhardt 1988; Clark

1985) than has been evident in the existing literature

reviews of innovation speed. We invoke such ideas

about how time is experienced in order to build a

framework to guide our systematic review based on

a ‘CIMO’ architecture (Denyer and Tranfield 2009).

The findings concerning management interventions

for speed are then presented in terms of temporal

categories (rather than more conventional categories

such as technology, sector or firm size). By these

means, we identify a barrier to innovation speed that

has not been hitherto developed within this literature:

a slowing of innovation work as a result of differ-

ent temporal orientations (or temporal dichotomies)

being held by innovation actors. The discussion sec-

tion examines the implications of the findings for our

conceptual understanding of the mechanisms by

which speed is realized in innovation work. We con-

clude by identifying areas for future academic re-

search and the implications of our ideas for innovation

practitioners. Our motivation in this whole endeavour

is to extend the terms on which innovation speed is

understood and researched.

Previous literature reviews of

innovation speed

There have been a number of literature reviewsexam-

ining the concept and practices of innovation speed

(Brownand Eisenhardt 1995; Cankur taran et al. 2013;

Chen et al. 2010; Kessler and Chakrabarti 1996;

Zirger and Hartley 1994). A sixth literature review

(Menon et al. 2002) is not as well developed as the

others, uncovers no additional insights and fails to

reference any of the earlier reviews, and is therefore

not examined here in any detail. The contribution of

each of the five major reviews is examined briefly in

this section.

The ‘acceleration techniques’ (Zirger and Hartley

1994), organizational ‘factors’ (Brown and Eisen-

hardt 1995; Kessler and Chakrabarti 1996) and ‘an-

tecedents’ (Chen et al. 2010) from previous re-

views are summarized in Table 1. They are further

categorized using labels similar to those that are

used in the reviews themselves: ‘Strategy’; ‘Project’;

‘Team/People’; and ‘Process’. Table 1 illustrates a

similarity in thinking and approach evident in the ex-

isting reviews.We argue that this thinking is limited in

a number of ways. First, wenote the dominance of an

approach taken towardinnovation speed that is akin to

that of efficient project management techniques. The

innovation journey between original idea and launch

of product is conceptualized as entailing the execu-

tion of a series of tasks. Faster innovation journey

times are then achieved by a judicious combination

of: (a) shrinking the time taken to complete a task;

(b) running tasks concurrently; (c) avoiding waiting

time between tasks; and (d) avoiding the repetition of

tasks. From this perspective, innovation projects are

treated as being no different from any other project.

Indeed, Kessler and Chakrabarti acknowledge that

their propositions advocate a similar approach to

that when improving the efficiency of manufacturing

processes (Kessler and Chakrabarti 1996, p. 1181).

Time within innovation projects thus becomes a sim-

ple resource, and the achievement of accelerated in-

novation becomes a matter of using that resource

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