Research on innovation in organizations: Distinguishing innovation-generating from innovation-adopting organizations

Research on innovation in organizations has generally examined the differences in the characteristics of innovative and non-innovative organizations, an endeavor that has often produced inconsistent results. In this paper, we propose that future research may resolve those inconsistencies by incorporating in the theory the differences between organizations that mostly generate innovations and those that mostly adopt innovations. We refer to the former, which are primarily producers or suppliers of innovation, as innovation-generating organizations, and to the latter, which are preponderantly users of innovations produced by innovation-generating organizations, as innovation-adopting organizations. Building on the notion that the processes of generating and adopting innovation are distinct phenomena that are facilitated by different organizational conditions, we discuss how the distinction between innovation-generating and innovation-adopting organizations would contribute to clarifying several inconsistent research findings, such as the relationship between innovation and size, the role of innovation radicalness, and the selection of appropriate measures of innovation.