Tearing down the façades of radical innovation

•Organizations pre-emptively display what Nystrom and Starbuck (1984) called “façades” – symbolic and appealing false-fronts – designed to entice stakeholders and customers into early adoption of their “radical innovations”•The paper shows that façades can provide organizations with enacted institutional shelters for radical innovation, hence, at the end producing overall shareholder value.•By invoking deviations from the root, radical innovation façades encourage employees to ignore institutionalized practices and to rejuvenate radical innovations that would have been otherwise rejected.•Organizational façades may be instrumental in fighting the linearity induced by roadmaps and innovation imposed milestones, hence unexpectedly reducing organizational rigidities•The more autonomous the development of a façade, the more likely it will trigger clandestine exploration of radical deviations from the root technologies of a company.•Exaggerated efforts put in “façade crafting” accordingly leads to façade collapse, suggesting that loose coupling is critical in maintaining the innovation momentum initially triggered by the first façade generation•Discarded as unwanted misrepresentations and marketing tactics of pre-emptive announcements, progressive façades may be turned into an innovation management practice to help organizations engage in radical innovation.

Managers construct organizational façades that mislead external stakeholders, organizational members, auditors, researchers, other managers, and even themselves (Nystrom & Starbuck, 1984). Very little empirical research has been conducted on how managers build these façades since Nystrom & Starbuck's first influential article. This paper reports on the creation of an organization innovation façade from the day of initial crafting to its final collapse. The paper proposes a theoretical model of façade-crafting in large organizations, and its unsuspected role in fostering radical innovation, radical change and transformative action.