Endogenous Innovation. When Inner Organizational Dynamics Afford and Constrain Change

We live in a world of inexorable change, where the network of economic, political and social processes that form the social and economic system is continually being redesigned. Not only do the cultural bases of the individuals and the cultures of the organizations change, but the organizations also evolve through modification and innovation of their structures, processes and output, in the attempt to loosen the old restraints while setting new objectives and rewriting the programmes for their achievement. Innovating for change represents the natural approach for dealing with such a dynamic environment made of individuals, social systems and organizations.This paper addresses the endogenous underpinnings of innovation, studying organizational routines as they account for a large share of organizational work and as such provide a relevant source for stability and change.Major stream of literature, while applying a practice perspective, focus on the internal dynamic of one organizational routine. It is argued that routines are conceived as constituted of an ostensive and a performativedimension whose mutual constitutive influence is a source of stability andchange, giving rise to variation (innovation from the inner part) or selective retention of the organizational routine. This paper aims to extend the available existing theory, embracing a typical systemic approach, and proposes that innovation involves accounts for stability and change of an organization, as made of more than the sum of the single organizational internal dynamics of routines.Particularly, the paper develops the idea of systems of organizational interconnected routines in order to explore how the participation of the same actor and/or action in the iteration of more than one organizational routine determines an interconnection, and dynamisms, among the respective organizational routines. The provided analysis reveals that actors inside organizations engage in continuous performance (action) and interpretation of actions. We discuss the propagation of an internal dynamic generated in one organizational routine into the iteration of another, interconnected organizational routine. The results highlight the importance of understanding the interconnection of organizational routines for studying and explaining endogenous sources of innovation in organizations. Overall the paper not only intends to create awareness for the explanatory potential involved in the idea of extending the theory of organizational routines from focusing on one organizational routine to considering whole systems of interconnected organizational routines and particularly the dynamics therein, but also to generate novelty in the field of innovation and change management.