Management of sustainable innovations in organizations

The course will introduce the differing ways of managing innovation processes that different organizational structures lead to. Organizations of today are complex and never solely one thing at a time. Primarily, there is the regular, formal, and often hierarchical organisation we meet in the organigrams, which provides the structural basics still yet in many organisations. Additionally, there are many temporary organizational forms in today’s organizations and innovation projects are often done in such forms. Finally, there is the increasingly important notion of the extended organisation, in which complex networks of organisations collaborate intensively in and around innovation projects on many varying levels (i.e., standard ways of firm collaboration, dyads, collaborative inter-organizational networks, regional/national innovation systems). The essential challenge in the interface of innovation and organizational politics that this course addresses is that too many innovation projects and processes fail or underperform because key people involved in these do neither adequately understand organizational life good enough nor can maneuver the complex organizational landscapes within their own organization or between it and its many collaborating organizations.