At the management innovation conference at Copenhagen Business School in early September academics and practitioners gathered to share their insights, challenges and research on management innovation.

A theme that emerged pretty soon was the discussion around what management innovation actually is. While some were requesting a definition and insisting on the need of a definition to be able to further research and develop this young field, others thought it sufficient to describe what the author of a paper meant by management innovation, so that papers could be clearly identified and clustered. Still a third stream argued that the field doesn’t need a definition at all and will benefit from multiple viewpoints. While this last approach might be helpful in academia it certainly is not in business. (At least from my experience. Feel free to comment.)

Businesses need a framework, a model, to think through the issues involved. Otherwise it is nearly impossible to make a decision or even just have a fruitful discussion. Without such a definition, the discussion will focus more on what it is we are discussing (just like it did in Copenhagen) instead of producing a tangible result.

So here’s my shot at defining “management innovation”. Consider it being a blend of academia and practice, my 10 cents and those of others. (And thanks again to all participants of the conference for their thoughts and ideas.)

• Management Innovation vs other types of innovation: What distinguishes management innovation from other types of innovation? Gary Hamel writes “Management innovation is anything that substantially alters the way in which the work of management is carried out, or significantly modifies customary organizational forms, and, by doing so, advances organizational goals.” and further “…management innovation targets a company’s management processes (note: as opposed to business and operational processes) – the recipes and routines that determine how the work of management gets carried out on a day-to-day basis.” While Hamel seems to focus on reinventing how management works, Birkinshaw and Mol add that it also changes what managers do. “…it is about innovation in management principles and processes that ultimately change the actual practice of what managers do, and how they get it done. It is different to operational or process innovation, which is about how the actual work of transforming inputs into outputs, gets done.” They also note that management innovation has to be undertaken to further the company’s goals.
• Theory vs practice: The qualify as a management innovation the idea you might have, needs to be put in practice. The idea is nothing, action is everything. Management innovation leads to new management practices.
• Incremental vs radical: At the moment web 2.0 tools are becoming popular among organizations. Usually these initiatives start as an experiment before being implemented on a larger scale throughout the enterprise. According to Prof. Birkinshaw of London Business School this is also the case with management innovation. Many practices that might seem radical when looking back started with small, incremental experiments, often only in one area of the company, before being rolled out and adopted by others.
• Adoption vs new to the world: By definition an innovation is something new. And it is something new to the world and not only a company. Reinventing the wheel or using the wheel just because somebody else does, does not count as a management innovation. We have already a name for such a practice: it’s called “benchmarking” and adopting “best practices”.  It doesn’t help us at all if we start giving the same thing a new name, just because it’s more sexy to talk about “innovation” than “best practices” at the moment. That’s old wine in new bottles. Management innovation has to be new to the state of the art! Period.

Have a look at my innovation map for further differences to other types of innovation.

Management innovation targets management processes, practices and tools. It changes what management does and/or the it gets done. So what does management do? This is defined by the company’ or manager’s “management model”. So “management innovation” is “management model innovation” if you like.

Next week I’ll explore the idea of “management model” a bit further and we’ll have a look at the CEO of Lego’s management model. So be sure to check back.